Anyone heard of Vitt Rogatski?

[Lon Haverly]

I met him 6 years ago two months before his death. He stood watching me draw at my mall studio for a long time. He finally said, "I have finally met someone who draws like I do!" I turned to him and asked about him. He was very old. He said he was an art teacher at the local community college teaching portrait drawing. I asked him what method he used. He said he made his students meticulously copy drawings of Walter Foster and others. I was delighted, as that is somewhat how I learned from my grandfather. When asked, he said he was trained in Florence, Italy, where he was only allowed to copy the great drawings and paintings of the masters for three years, and nothing else. Just copy. That is all I learned of him until two months later, when my neighbor at the mall mentioned that she saw me talking to an elderly artist, and if I remembered him. He had died the previous day. He was her neighbor. I told her I recalled the teacher at the college. She told me the rest of his story. He was a teen in Poland during the German occupation. His life and that of his little brothers and sisters was spared because he could draw portraits of the Nazi soldiers so beautifully that they would line up at his door. After the war, he was adopted into an Italian family who put him into the art school there. By then he was already a legend. He painted all the heads of state in Europe, moved to Hollywood and painted the stars, and painted Nancy Reagan for the White House. He later moved to Eugene to retire and teach. Good story, heh?