“Eat Tofu,” the turkey’s sign reads.
The laidback, far-from-desperate-looking painted turkey could be seen in the window located upstairs in Bakersfield College’s Tutoring Center in the Student Services building.
A muscular, black t-shirt wearing piano tutor painted the sleepy-eyed, Pilgrim hat-wearing turkey holding the “Eat Tofu” sign.
A small group of fellow tutors collected around the goateed artist at the window and good-naturedly heckled the artist/tutor’s progress.
“That’s a pretty relaxed turkey considering it’s gonna be on someone’s plate, Josh,” one tutor remarked. “I’d say it’s a stoned turkey,” corrected another tutor.
“It’s a hippy turkey,” another tutor said.
“It just needs to flash a peace sign along with that sign that says, ‘Eat tofu,'” concluded another.
BC music tutor and art major Josh Manion took the quips in stride as he painted another holiday icon on the Tutoring Center window. Manion says he has been painting the window for about two years now.
Manion, who specializes in digital arts, added letters that read, “free tutoring” to the turkey’s multicolored feathers. Around Halloween, the TC window displayed Manion’s depiction of the Headless Horseman holding what a lot of tutors and tutees thought was a very “reptilian-looking” pumpkin. Tutors and tutees alike say they marvel at Manion’s artistic range.
“Josh came up to the Tutoring Center as a piano tutor,” said Midge Ladd, tutorial coordinator for the Tutoring Center. “He’s multitalented.”
Manion is the first Tutoring Center piano tutor to paint the TC window regularly, Ladd said.
Manion says he has been drawing ever since he was a small child, and, although he admires comic book artists such as Todd McFarlane, who created the garish “Spawn” comic book figure, Manion concedes he is more of a “realist” when comes to drawing and painting.
For the paintings on the Tutoring Center’s window, Manion draws the figure or scene on paper first, and then, on the window itself, Manion makes an outline with a dry-erase marker. This particular marker makes potential corrections easy, Manion says.
Often, Manion admits, he will “cruise” the Internet for various images to use for drawing. For the image Manion used for Valentine’s Day, he found a representation of a Raphael cherub, which he used as a frame of reference.
For St. Patrick’s Day, Manion found on the Internet a photo of a mural on an Irish pub that depicted a leprechaun. Manion favors using acrylic paints for the window because the artist, as Manion says, “can layer them and then scrape it right off with a ruler or a razor afterwards.”
As both an artist and as a musician, Manion draws a lot of inspiration from jazz artists. His reason is that jazz focuses on the uniqueness of the individual artist.
“The main emphasis of jazz is individual soloing,” Manion said.
Duke Ellington is one of Manion’s favorite jazz artists. Manion said that Ellington was originally a painter.
“Ellington once said he painted canvases with sound and not color,” Manion said.