"My fingers are getting hard to operate," says master painter Aaron Bohrod, 82, in contributing editor George Vukelich's lengthy feature article. "It's arthritis. You have to pay penalties for being around so darn long." Yet Bohrod still spends every day in his Monona studio. A native of Chicago, Bohrod covered World War II as an artist for Life magazine and painted covers for Time but is perhaps best known for fooling the eye with objects painted to look three-dimensional. "I have to do art, whether anybody else looks at it with approval or not," explains Bohrod. "I'm lucky that the energies required to produce a painting aren't quite the same as the energies required to stand in a boxing ring and sustain yourself for five or six rounds." Bohrod dies in 1992, Vukelich in 1995; both are still revered by those who knew them.
A meeting of the masters
From the Isthmus archives, April 20, 1990