Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
His art career has spanned 65 years, and he’s still going at age 88.
Examples of Al Napoletano’s art hang on walls throughout his Wiley Creek home, and old-school country western music plays on satellite radio as he talks about his passion. Westerns are a staple of his movie collection, although it includes several other genres.
One bedroom is dedicated to art, and he’s hoping to start oil painting again.
Since he was a young city kid in San Francisco, Napoletano, now a resident of Wiley Creek Community’s independent living, has drawn scenes of the Old West, most of it as fiction magazine illustrations. He also has illustrated five books.
Napoletano was born in San Francisco on April 23, 1920 and lived there until moving to Oregon after he retired.
He showed an early talent for drawing, but his family didn’t see art as a practical livelihood and his father trained him to be a machinist.
But Napoletano stubbornly kept pursuing his drawing and painting.
“I’m also what is known as a self-taught artist,” he said. “I’ve never had any professional training, which I would have liked.”
It was all trial-and-error, he said. “I’ve destroyed a lot of my drawings because I didn’t have a lot of professional training.”
What advantages he lacked in art never frustrated him, though, he said, because he loved it.
In 1943 his efforts paid off when his work was published in “Western Horseman.”
“After that I began to do illustrations for one heck of a lot of magazines.”
Many of those magazines, such as “Horse Lovers,” have been discontinued, he said. “I had a good run with Western Publications, which handled ‘True West,’ ‘Frontier Times’ and ‘Old West.'”
He started illustrating for the company in 1953 and while other artists came and went, he spent about 50 years drawing for its magazines. The company eventually dropped all of its publications except “True West.”
“Today, it looks like a glorified catalog for western outfits, to me anyway,” Napoletano said. He drew covers and did his first color work for the inside of the magazine. Now, the magazine relies on photos and art by one of the owners.
“The hardest part of drawing for the magazines was the research I had to do,” he said. The magazine would send a manuscript, and he had to match the art to the story.
His work wasn’t limited to magazines, he said. He has done a lot of work for the California Rodeo at Red Bluff and also for the Calapooia Roundup, now Sweet Home Rodeo.
Napoletano has had shows and exhibits at galleries across California, and he did oil painting on commission while still living there.
The Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, Texas, has “a great display of a lot of my work,” he said.
Napoletano moved to the Sweet Home-Lebanon area when he retired in 1982.
“The only thing I had to give up was my oil painting,” he said, adding that he didn’t have room to paint after moving to Oregon.
He has one daughter living in Brownsville, a grandson, a great-granddaughter and two sisters, one in Roseburg and one in California.
He keeps producing more drawings. Even when he’s not working on something in particular, he’ll draw elaborate Old West scenes on letters, envelopes and packages, something he calls his trademark. A museum in Georgia had some of those on display last year.
At Christmas time, he draws special cards for special people, he said.
Napoletano said he used to receive many nice letters from England, Portugal, Sweden – all over the world, from people who had seen his art.
“I met a lot of nice people and got a lot of nice letters,” he said. “The ones I liked best were from ranchers, cowboys and rodeo riders.”
They would say he must have lived on a ranch to draw horses the way he does, he said, but he grew up in San Francisco, where he was born.
“I was always fascinated with the horses and wagons that were running around San Francisco when I was a kid,” Napoletano said. The bread man and the milkman, for example, did their deliveries by horse and wagon.
“I used to draw pictures for the school kids,” he said. “They used to call me cowboy. When I was in grade school, I did a drawing of an eagle, and they thought it was good enough to hang in the corner of the grammar school.
“I used to draw other stuff, but the west was my bag of tricks. I was pretty fortunate. I’m a city guy. What the heck did I know of anything about the west. I’m not the best artist in the world, but I ain’t the worst.”
Drawing has always been largely a hobby, Napoletano said. He was a machinist by trade.
Drawing is his passion, he said, and he didn’t miss his career at all.
“I didn’t want anything to do with the machinist trade after I retired,” he said. “(His art) was a good hobby to retire to.”