Dorchester
Mark Richardson, a fellow painter, was there. While loved ones reminisced and prepared to make their goodbyes, Richardson studied Pon in the half-light of a nearby lamp, secretly sketching onto a pad on his lap.
Pon, who went by “Bob,” had a profile of granite, Richardson remembered later. The dome of his friend’s forehead, he said, was “as bald as Mount Cardigan,” and a sweep of long gray hair trailed back from it like a covering of hardy alpine forest.
Pon was telling tales from his life: the childhood years during the Depression; the horrors of World War II combat in Europe; the sun and shadows of Chinatown in postwar Manhattan, where a young painter who had seen things beyond his years wandered in search of subjects.
All of a sudden, the dying man looked over.
“Are you drawing me?” he asked. “Can I see that?”
Richardson showed him.
“Yes,” Pon said. “That is what happens when you get to be my age. The ears get outsized, and the nose — it just seems too large for the face.”
Just as Richards thought he might have detected a tinge of wistfulness, Pon looked up from the drawing, his eyes flickering.
In his last hours, he met death with a deep and defiant belly laugh.
The end of life was chief among Pon’s fixations as an artist. He melded it with other imagery, much of it dark: Greek mythology, the New Testament, visions of downtrodden people and their oppressors.
One oil of his depicts a woman in a black robe holding a child close to her breast. The scene is rendered in shades of black and gray, the emotion delivered through the thick, unrelenting layering of paint.
The woman might be mistaken for a mythological figure — Mary holding Jesus, maybe. In fact, she was a real woman, an immigrant mother whom Pon passed by as he strolled the docks of New York City.
Not many Upper Valley residents knew Bob Pon, who died on Aug. 21. After a turn in the military and a long career as a library illustrator — an entire life’s worth of work — he moved up to Dorchester, where he spent 30 more years in relative solitude, roaming the wilderness and coming home to his studio to pour his obsessions into painting and sculpture.
Pon was born on Oct. 29, 1923, to Florence Hilton, an unwed woman who lived in Cleveland, Ohio. The family was often on welfare, and an early light in Pon’s life was a free class offered at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Although he never knew his biological father, Pon believed that his mother once arranged for them to meet. She brought young Robert to a house where a painter was working on a ladder. No words were exchanged, and Florence never explained the encounter. It was the secretive air about his mother that made Robert suspect the man’s identity.
“Why bring him to see this stranger?” asked Bob’s son, Michael.
Pon’s mother did have eccentric habits, it was true. A regular outing for the Pon family, for instance, consisted of Florence’s taking Robert to complete strangers’ funerals.
Neither Michael nor Pon’s wife, Katherine, ever knew Florence Hilton, so they couldn’t explain what drove her behavior. The best Katherine could do was show a visitor a weathered photograph of the woman hanging in the Dorchester home: a pale, brooding face looked out, fixing the camera with an intense but somehow off-center gaze — as if she were staring both at the photographer and at nothing at all.
Yet Michael, at least, thought the visit to the painter had some special meaning. It was a peculiar incident but, more importantly, an isolated one.
“OK, so there was the odd habit of bringing him to strangers’ funerals,” he said, “but at least this was a theme.”
As a child, Pon did have a male role model: his stepfather, a Chinese immigrant named Yee Pon who killed himself when the boy was 11.
“Well, there you go,” Michael Pon said. He tallied up the influences of his father’s childhood: the strange and morbid mother, the immigrant stepfather, the funerals, the suicide — all of which the elder Pon expressed as themes in his art.
Pon came of age in the 1940s, and for a time he stayed home rather than join the war abroad.
Shame, not belligerence, made him enlist, his son said. As he rode the bus each morning, headed to the camp for disabled children where he worked, he noticed that he was the only young man on board.
“There were all these women of his age looking at him,” Michael said, “wondering why he wasn’t over there.”
Pon entered the U.S. Army as a medic with the 279th Engineer Combat Battalion, just in time for the invasion of Germany.
On Feb. 23, 1945, his unit supported infantry as they crossed a river to attack Axis soldiers. As the assault boats returned to the Allied shore, he administered first aid to the wounded in full view of the enemy and under intense artillery fire.
His “heroic exploit,” as superiors called it, earned him a Bronze Star.
“His service was a source of inspiration and pride to the men with whom he worked, and his efforts contributed materially to the success of the operation and reflect great credit on the military service of the United States,” Major General A.C. Gillem Jr. wrote in Pon’s citation.
Germany surrendered a few months later, and Pon found himself back in the States. He went to art school on the G.I. Bill and afterward joined the Ashcan School, an artistic movement focusing on scenes of daily life in New York.
It was during those years in the city that Pon adopted a lifelong habit, one that informed his work: walking.
Throughout the rest of his life, when Pon moved to a new place, he bought a map. Nearly every day he strolled from here to there, getting to know the people, the buildings, the architecture. Then he came home and marked where he had been.
Gradually he would fill that map with lines, tracing the deepening of his understanding of the world around him.
In postwar New York, he drew a grid of his own on top of Manhattan’s, and came home to empty his head of the things he’d seen: homeless people, immigrant laborers; underdogs and people in distress.
In 1951, Pon took a job at the New York Public Library, where he worked as an illustrator for 30 years and along the way met Katherine, his third wife.
Pon had a deep distrust of authority, which translated to his job, as well. During down time at the library, he and his friends drew caricatures of the administrators. Some had black clouds in front of their faces, Michael remembers, “because that’s all they could see — was darkness.”
“Sometimes he’d put uniforms on them and have them goosestep,” Michael said. “He had a black humor about him.”
Michael added, “He was a very reclusive man, also. Others at his time, his peers, did more socializing and making connections, and some of those people got somewhere with their work and got to be known and be more of a name, but he was seriously not interested — although the caliber of his work certainly had the quality.
“But he shied away from that and would rather be in his studio working than be out there making connections.”
In 1981, after three decades of labor for someone else, Pon got the chance to work for himself.
“The day he retired was the happiest day of his life,” Katherine said. “He changed” — she snapped her fingers — “I can’t tell you how he changed. He changed entirely.”
He began a new period of his life, one of constant and solitary production that lasted even longer than his erstwhile professional years. In 1988, the family moved up to Dorchester, to be closer to Michael, now a reporter and novelist in southern New Hampshire.
Although he almost never sought acclaim for his art, Pon devoted as much time as he could to it. He kept a journal where he wrote down the length and results of each workday.
His devotion was an inspiration to Katherine, also a novelist, who said she learned from her husband’s self-reliance.
“If you’re a writer, you write,” she said. “If you’re a painter, you paint. You do it.”
Michael said later of his father, “He was remarkable in the sense that he never needed to do what many of us do to relax — go out to a bar, drink, do anything like that. … This was not him. He was happy in being who he was as he was without any of that.”
Whereas some people depend on something artificial, whether drugs, alcohol or adrenaline, to get by, Michael said, “(My father) could just take a walk and take a look at the world around him, and that would put him on a high. That’s something that’s really hard to master, to be quiet inside, and for him it came naturally.”
During Pon’s retirement, the family spent most of the year in the Upper Valley but also kept a small, rent-controlled apartment in New York. Besides showing his work a few times at the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, teaching a few students, and serving on the Dorchester Historical Society (the Pon home is located in the town’s historic district), Bob kept to his work and to himself.
He also came to see other exhibitions at AVA, said the gallery’s executive director, Bente Torjusen. Although Torjusen didn’t know him well, and recalled little about the art he showed a decade ago, she still remembers how he responded to pieces he appreciated: not just intellectually, but on a personal level.
“He was a gentle, sensitive soul,” she said. “As an artist coming to look at other artists’ work, he approached it with such a sensitivity that you almost felt that he could start crying, if he became really moved by a work of art.”
At Pon’s memorial service, Mark Richardson, who traveled from Connecticut to be there, recalled another formative moment from his friend’s artistic life.
Back in the ‘40s, during the invasion of Germany, Pon was given leave to France. He chose to see the cathedral at Reims, a 13th-century masterwork of medieval architecture that towered over the old city, which had seen considerable destruction in the war.
“He spoke glowingly of it, decades after,” said Richardson. “Just imagine — what a contrast between the destructive and creative poles of humanity. The hands of man were as equally capable of wielding a tool to kill as they were of carving an angel out of limestone.
“That revelation,” Richardson added, “was never lost to him.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.