| FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE Local
Artist Commissioned to Paint Portrait
of a Military Hero
Karen Gardner, Assistant Family
Editor
Frederick News Post, March 13,
2002
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Left - Artist David
Sample did this painting of
Navy diver Frank W. Crilley.
Mr. Sample recently completed
the portrait, which will hang
in the quarterdeck of a new
naval diving facility in San
Diego that will be named for
Crilley. Crilley performed a
heroic rescue of a fellow
deep-sea diver off the coast
of Honolulu in
1915. Staff
photo by Marny Malin |
Frank
W. Crilley saved a man's life back in
1915. Ten years later, he was
recognized with the Medal of Honor.
Nearly 90 years later and 55 years
after his death, he will be
recognized again.
The Navy is
opening a new diving facility in San
Diego that will be named for Ensign
Crilley. Frederick artist David
Sample painted the oil portrait that
will hang in the building's foyer, or
quarterdeck. The building will be
dedicated in San Diego on Friday,
March 22.
Mr. Sample
worked with Crilley's grandson, also
named Frank Crilley, to paint the
portrait. It shows Crilley in dress
uniform with the Medal of Honor
around his neck. The medal is worn as
it would have been in the mid-1920s,
with 13 stars embroidered on a blue
ribbon. After that, the design was
changed.
Such attention
to detail is not unusual for Mr.
Sample. For the past 12 years, he has
been painting military aircraft for
collectors of aviation art. That's
his hobby. He spent 17 years on
active duty for the Navy. One of his
duties while in the Navy was working
in public affairs for the Blue
Angels, the Navy's elite flying
performance unit.
For the
promotional poster for this year's
World War II Weekend, in June at the
Mid Atlantic Air Museum in Reading,
Pa., Mr. Sample painted a B-25 flying
over Japan. The plane represents one
of "Doolittle's Raiders,"
the squadron of planes that bombed
Tokyo in 1942. He's been doing the
posters for the museum's famed air
show for the past eight years.
The Crilley
assignment came about because of Mr.
Sample's association with the younger
Mr. Crilley, who is a military
consultant and a former Marine Corps
officer living in Virginia.
"Frank knows what I do on the
side as an artist," Mr. Sample
said. "He owns a number of my
pieces."
The honors
bestowed on the elder Crilley are for
a heroic rescue he made in 1915.
Crilley rescued a fellow deep-sea
diver in Honolulu Harbor. A group of
Navy divers was trying to raise a
sunken U-boat 306 feet below the
water's surface. Fellow diver Frank
Loughman followed an 8-inch thick
steel hawser 250 feet down. At this
depth, the current caused the hawser
to bend. Loughman paused to rest and
became entangled in the hawser. The
entanglement broke his hip.
Loughman fell
unconscious and Crilley dove in after
him, not knowing what had happened.
He found Loughman and worked for an
hour and a half to free him. He then
arranged a dangerous but successful
plan to bring Loughman to the
surface. Both men took hours to
decompress from the deep sea
experience. Crilley had dived to a
depth of 306 feet, setting a record
for deep-sea diving for the time.
"When these
guys were diving, it was still very
primitive," he said. "These
guys spent two and a half hours under
water at 250 feet. Their
decompression would have taken days.
You can stay at 100 feet for about 15
minutes." Crilley was the Navy's
first diver to receive the Medal of
Honor.
Not only did
Crilley receive the Medal of Honor,
he also received the Navy Cross.
Crilley's Medal of Honor, typical of
all that go to Navy and Marine Corps
recipients, has an anchor on it. In
the painting, Crilley's stripes were
on his right sleeve. Today the
stripes are worn on the left sleeve.
Crilley's stripes indicated he was a
chief gunner's mate, with a
sub-specialty of diving.
Mr. Sample, 41,
has been painting military subjects
for many years. He grew up in
Portland, Ore., and took art lessons
for five years. He joined the Navy
after high school and worked as an
illustration draftsman for 13 years.
Back in 1989, he
was commissioned to paint an EA6
Prowler, an airplane built by Grumman
Aircraft. "I started doing more
and more, and someone suggested
having the painting reproduced into a
limited-edition print," he said.
It would cost about $3,000 to produce
the prints. "I dug into my
savings. Within a week, I had covered
the cost."
He has to be
very exact, as he did when painting
Crilley. To paint Crilley, Mr. Sample
had to track down the man's eye color
and hair color. There were no known
color pictures of Crilley, and his
grandson was born 14 years after
Crilley died. He finally found an old
article that mentioned Crilley was 5
feet 8 inches tall, weighed 160
pounds and had brown hair and blue
eyes. Crilley was born in 1883 and
was in his early 40s when awarded the
Medal of Honor.
Mr. Sample had
his daughter, who is a first class
midshipman at NC State, model the
uniform for him, and he painted his
facial details from a black and white
portrait photo taken about 1925.
It takes the
same kind of attention to detail to
paint planes accurately, especially
the warbirds of World War II.
"Airplanes changed almost daily
during World War II," Mr. Sample
said. "The B-17 is a classic
example. Almost every airplane that
came off the assembly line was
different."
Designs were
changed as crew members reported
flaws. "When we pick a theme we
pick a date and do as much research
as possible," he said. The B-25
painted for this year's World War II
weekend is shown in the late
afternoon, instead of in the morning.
The day was also sunny, not cloudy as
Mr. Sample has depicted. "I'll
fudge it a little for
aesthetics," he said. That's
mostly to get the background color
right.
He often
photographs skies to incorporate into
his paintings. He starts each
painting by tracing a mylar outline
of the airplane on the canvas, and
then putting a wash on the canvas.
All his paintings are in oil. He then
completes the background before
starting on the aircraft. "You
end up with a clean, crisp
line," he said.
He also ends up
with a print that many veterans are
willing to sign. Prints signed with
the signatures of veterans who flew a
particular plane are a trademark of
aviation art.
Occasionally Mr.
Sample depicts more modern aircraft
in his paintings, but he feels a
special need to reproduce World War
II-era planes. "The veterans are
dying off," he said. "They
won't be with us much longer."
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