|
Jonathan McGowan at 18 is a little wiser thanks to a brush
with death that has given him a greater appreciation for life
as well as uncommon insight into the importance of good
choices.
Jonathan McGowan's masterpiece, "Choices", is an aptly named
work of art that took months to complete, albeit only a second
of his life to conceive.
From the local contest at his recent alma mater of West
Carroll, "Choices" progressed to the annual regional
Congressional Art Competition sponsored by Congressman John
Tanner, where it earned an honorable mention.
The artist plans to begin classes at Jackson State this fall
with a subsequent transfer to U.T. Martin, where he hopes to
pursue a degree in art. "After that, I don't know; whatever
happens, it happens," says 18-year-old Jonathan.
In the meantime, he enjoys riding the back roads of his
country neighborhood, between Terry and Cedar Grove, studying
the relationships inherent in nature.
"I look at all of it--how it works--shades, colors, light and
dark and how everything goes together," he says. "Right now
I'm working on clouds and they're very hard."
He thumbs through an album filled with scenic photographs. "I
carry a $5.00 camera everywhere I go; I'm always taking
pictures," he shares, comparing a photograph, in which a
panorama of clouds emerges from a dusky sunset, to his own
drawing. "I'll get it one day," he tells himself.
Jonathan started drawing at an early age, doodles and stick
figures accomplished while sitting in the cozy comfort of his
family's living room, watching T.V. Jonathan lives with
parents Mike and Debbie McGowan and his 17-year-old sister,
Sara.
"I'd listen and draw," he says, recalling Disney favorites
that were a staple of his early years. "I just always drew;
nobody really taught me. I just picked it all up on my own, I
guess."
He went through a phase of drawing dogs, then ducks, but, he
says with a thoughtful gaze toward a display of decoys that
were his models, "I haven't drawn a duck in awhile, not since
I started the other."
"The other" came about one evening in August last year when he
was lying on the living room floor and, he says, "I saw it all
in my head. I really don't know why or how it came to me."
The vision wasn't all inclusive; it took time and thought to
determine some segments of the illustration that he began, in
September, setting to canvas in what would become "Choices".
"I didn't work on it everyday, just whenever I felt like it,"
says Jonathan, who completed the work the week of the school
contest.
The scene begins with an apparently young man standing at a
crossroad marked "Choose", contemplating his way.
Jonathan explains, "There are two roads, a wide one and a
narrow one, that lead to Heaven and Hell. You start off with
that choice--and you can't see where it ends up, you've just
got to go with it," he continues. "You can always go back, but
the farther you go, the harder it is; there's the fence, and a
bridge, and the desert..."
The desert was the last element to come into play in the
design. For a long while, a chasm of white canvas separated
the opposing kingdoms.
"I had no idea what was going to be in the middle of it; I had
in mind a field but a desert's what came out," he says,
nodding toward the greens and golds and rusts of the drawing
propped in the seat of a chair nearby.
One portion of the illustration came about due to Jonathan's
love of literature: Vanity Fair can be seen lying in wait at
the edge of the wilderness on the way to the Celestial
Kingdom, in a scene borrowed from John Bunyan's 1678 classic,
"Pilgrim's Progress."
"It was one of my favorites; I like English so I paid
attention to all that," says Jonathan, mentioning that he also
enjoys writing poetry and songs.
The smooth, rich colors of the drawing Jonathan attributes to
Prismacolor pencils, purchased from Hobby Lobby, that blend "a
whole lot better" than the regular color pencils used in his
previous works.
"They have oil pastels mixed in them," he says. "They're real
good but they ain't cheap."
The value of "Choices", however, goes deeper than media or
quality: "It's the one thing I've worked the hardest on, that
I actually had a vision for," says Jonathan. "It's the first
thing I've done where I filled out the white page; my mind
went in on that. And there's a lot of stuff in that, more than
I know," he says, going on to explain how he penciled the well
into the drawing without thought to its significance. "But
when I showed Grandma," he continues, "she said, that's
Jacob's well (John 4:5-43).
"That's basically what art is," he adds. "It makes people use
their minds. I like to have a point behind everything I draw.
If I'm going to do it, it may as well mean something; make
people think. Everyone won't see the same thing but you're
just as right as anybody else."
It was tragedy that brought Jonathan to a deeper level of
consideration regarding the meaning of life.
"I went through a lot about two years ago; I got caught on
fire and about died," he says. "Coming close to dying changes
a person. It puts life in more perspective; you see things
different, and that's why I started writing poetry, but I've
been drawing and coloring all my life."
It was on June 24, Jonathan recalls exactly, during the summer
between his sophomore and junior years, that he was camping in
the field behind his house with three friends--Jim Halford and
Derek Bynum of Atwood and Adriel Clark of McLemoresville--when
their campfire provided the spark that detonated a can of
gasoline.
"I was pretty close to it when it exploded," says Jonathan
who, with clothes aflame, in desperation ran into the nearby
pond in an effort at extinguishing the relentless flames.
Despite doctors' later warning that algae, fungus, and
bacteria in the farm pond could produce life-threatening
infections, Jonathan credits the impulsive move with saving
his life.
"Stop, drop and roll doesn't work with gasoline," he asserts,
having first attempted the maneuver to no avail.
The rest of the experience is hazy in Jonathan's memory,
though he recalls walking out of the pond with a host of
fears, including that the fire would consume the field and
beyond. Burned from the waist down as well as his arms, he
shivered with cold, with no skin remaining on his legs for
protection.
His friends summoned his father to the scene, after which,
Jonathan says, "Dad drove as fast as possible to the hospital.
Mom followed us freaking out even worse than Dad."
From the Milan emergency room, Jonathan was airlifted to the
Med (Regional Medical Center at Memphis) where he would remain
for about six weeks, better than the two-to-four months
initially anticipated when physicians feared he could lose his
legs.
"I healed faster than most, they were actually astounded,"
says Jonathan, who nevertheless recalls, "It hurt for a long
time, but you've got to get over it; I couldn't do nothing but
get over it."
He underwent several episodes of surgeries to replace lost
skin, using skin harvested from his chest and back. Hardest
was the necessity of lying flat in bed for two weeks, on two
occasions, following the skin grafts.
"I couldn't sit up for two weeks," he fairly moans in uneasy
memory. "The first time, the first week or so, I was so
drugged that it didn't matter, but the second time I was awake
and that was horrible."
To pass the time, he watched a lot of television, and he
wrote, a practice he has continued over the past two years. He
began by keeping a journal that evolved into poetry and song
as he pondered his close brush with death and the meaning of
life.
His writings, like his drawings, sometimes touch upon the
darker side of human nature and are full of the irony and
apparent inconsistencies of truth that complicate life. In the
end, he concludes, "Everything has changed for the better. I
want to take my time on this earth to leave it better than I
found it. That's the purpose, why we're here; you're to leave
it better than you came to it.
"I thought a lot about (the accident) and the reason behind
it, maybe why it happened. It just made me understand the
importance of life; that it can be taken away in a second and
you won't expect it up to that second," he continues, "and
that second changes everything. But now, I know there's no
reason to live to be afraid to die: Why be afraid to die?
Because this life ain't it; death is just another step.
"Hope is the key, without hope you're just here, I guess. You
have to hope or you're just walking through life pointlessly.
Never lose hope."
|
2005 Feature Archives: |
|
|
|
|
|
2004
Feature
Archives: |
|
|
|
. |
|
2003
Feature
Archives: |
|
|
|
. |
|
2002
Feature
Archives: |
|
|
|
. |
|
2001
Feature
Archives: |
|
|
|
