Author, Poet and Artist

While he lived, the author, Johnny F. Pugh, created art in many types of media. During the next twenty-five or so years, he worked a skilled journeyman painter and longtime member of the International Brotherhood of Carpenters and Painters Union. After undergoing three spinal fusions operations, which were necessary because one of his lower back vertebrae was cracked in September, 1966, as a soldier, part of a Search & Destroy Operation in the notorious Iron Triangle near Cu Chi, South Vietnam, when a “Bouncing Betty” landmine exploded behind him, throwing him like a rag doll some ten or fifteen feet away. The three fusions permanently damaged his back, which caused him so much pain that he could no longer work as a journeyman painter. He then turned his skilled hands to designing and painting super-graphic murals; he also painted portraits mostly with acrylic paint; he rediscovered his passion for sculpturing in alabaster and some marble.

Paintings by the author, Johnny F. Pugh:

  • Shy but Contemporary Maiden
  • Portrait of daughter Nicole at Sixteen
  • Portrait of Nicole at Twenty-One
  • Reflection of Two Dancers
  • Two Girls on a Bridge

These five paintings are the only ones left that were painted by husband, the late Johnny F. Pugh. Tragically, the rest of them were lost or stolen.

Poetry by the author, Johnny F. Pugh: 

Puppets

Strangers in a mindless mechanical universe
Bobbing about, waving their arms,
Filling the air with babble
To assure themselves that they are,
As they melt into a darkness of not being
More and more,
As policy people put words in their mouths
And nail their eyelids shut.

Absence

In the night,
In the absence of anything
That mattered in the day,
Our bodies come together,
Enveloped in galaxies of black velvet,
Knowing something our minds do not.
Feeling each other from the inside,
Moment currents pass between us,
Fueling our emotions
Like a military occupation
Of our heart and mind,
Until psychic explosions
Leave us spent
And glowing in love.