Artist Draws on Depths of Experience : Mural: John Jennings, who survived a traumatic youth and a tour of duty in Vietnam, is going to paint an ocean scene for no charge on a wall near the Oceanside Pier. It is his ‘welcome home’ to Gulf War troops.

He was the boy in the box, confined by the sadistic headmaster of a military school in Washington state who later was convicted of abusing the children in his care.

For nearly five months when he was 8 years old, John Jennings’ only companion was a mouse and his own imagination, which comforted him with visions of silent pastures and crystal raindrops splattering on a windowsill.

That terrifying experience 35 years ago helped forge Jennings into the artist he is today.

Something else important to know about Jennings, now 43 and living in the hills of Vista: As a combat photographer in Vietnam, he captured on paper the fear and death that bound soldiers together emotionally.

The box gave him a lust for freedom. The war left a reverence for those who endure nightmarish combat. Together, those two forces have led Jennings to offer a unusual gift to the city of Oceanside.

The gift: dolphins, gray whales and a panoramic view of the coastal city as depicted on a 16-foot-high and 45-foot-wide mural that Jennings, an environmental marine artist, will paint for no charge on a wall near the Oceanside Pier.

Jennings was moved to donate the mural after watching the Marines from Camp Pendleton march down Hill Street after their return from the Gulf War. He sadly remembered how, when he came home from Vietnam, nobody seemed to care.

“It’s really my way of saying, as a Vietnam vet, ‘welcome home,’ ” Jennings said.

City officials eagerly accepted the gift, which Jennings will begin painting this month, weather permitting. Officials figure the dancing images of life above and below the sea will give the beachfront a new visual dimension.

“This mural will add aesthetic pleasure to that view,” said Dan Sanchez, the city’s parks and recreation director. “There is no question about the quality or integrity of the work.”

Jennings is a known commodity, especially in California, where his murals, paintings and lithographs adorn public streets and galleries.

He painted a similar mural, but four times as large, on a building leading into Cannery Row on Monterey Bay, where merchants were at first wary of the grandiose undertaking.

But, since it was unveiled a year ago, his whale’s-eye view of Monterey Bay has opened the eyes of tourists to the area.

“One of the problems we have is it’s almost too successful,” said Michael Sarka, manager of the Cannery Row Promotional District.

The mural has become so popular that the very merchants who once derided the idea now are calling for the removal of trees blocking the view of the art work, he said.

Jennings’ art represents a long journey from literal and emotional darkness, and reflects his joy at simply being alive.

He never knew his father, an El Paso motorcycle officer who was divorced from his wife when Jennings was only 2. But when, at age 4, he drew pencil and crayon mountain scenes with lines and shadings, his mother and grandmother knew enough to nurture the child’s talent.

“I had a conceptual feel for shadow and light,” said Jennings, who would peer at scenes and objects, tracking how they changed in tone as the sunlight passed into night. “That was like a toy to me.”

Yet childhood wasn’t playful for Jennings, who was often uprooted as his mother traveled around to find work. There were a few idyllic years living on a farm in Washington state, where the boy’s imagination could fix on the gentleness of nature, the open fields surrounded by lush forest.

“My fondest memories as a child were of being on that farm,” he recalled. “It was looking out a window onto the beautiful open field and seeing the sun shine at the same time as it was raining.”

Later, the remembrance of that shimmering scene virtually saved Jennings.

His mother remarried, but Jennings was having emotional and disciplinary problems in school. His mother enrolled him in Hopkins Military Academy in Redmond, Wash., where the headmaster later was arrested for his cruel actions.

“He was a sadist,” Jennings said.

The headmaster punished him over a trifling matter by shutting him in a large wooden box in a barracks, he said. Food was brought in, he said, but he was not allowed to leave the box for anything, even going to the toilet.

The boy cried many hours, finding solace only in the mouse that visited him for a time and in his own imagination.

He withdrew into his dream world, Jennings said, conjuring mental pictures of the farm, the sunshine and the raindrops that softly pelted the window.

His mother, who had been repeatedly turned away when she came to visit, one day brought the sheriff to the academy, he said, freeing him.

Of his ordeal, he said, “I’ll never forget it until I die.”

But it also left him with something indelible. “It gave me the gift to create from my imagination.”

Redmond police Sgt. George Potts said old-timers retired from the Police Department still remember the problems at the academy during the late 1950s.

Newspaper stories from those days recount how the headmaster faced numerous charges, including confining one boy in a bathroom for several days and feeding him only bread and water; ordering one boy to be beaten with a swagger stick; and threatening the parents of another boy with a pistol. He was convicted in November, 1959, of two counts of assault against his students, the old clippings show.

In the years afterward, Jennings said, he was placed in reform schools and other board-and-care facilities, but when he was 11, an art professor named Richard Trojan from Oregon State University came to the home for boys where Jennings lived then and selected children to tutor.

Before long, Jennings had found a mentor and was receiving private lessons from Trojan.

“He reseeded me inside,” Jennings said.

Trojan, now retired, recalls the little boy who fascinated the college students by drawing elaborate, postage stamp-sized designs on paper. He was “very creative although undirected,” Trojan said.

But the tiny shapes revealed more than the boy’s originality to Trojan; the absence of drawings about things and subjects showed repression. “He was avoiding making a statement of what was important in his life,” he said.

Still, Jennings wasn’t outwardly troubled, and Trojan recalled, “This was a bright kid who was vivacious, really interested in talking to people.” And, before long, he found Jennings drawing figures with perspective and scope.

Five years ago, Trojan saw some of Jenning’s adult work, which showed that the artist had followed his heart, but hadn’t pursued formal art training. “In terms of his isolation from the academic kind of art, I consider (his work) something unusual and exceptional,” Trojan said.

In the late ‘60s, long after the orphanage days, the draft board caught up with Jennings, who was leading a Dylanesque life as a drifter and staying with friends at Venice Beach. He went to Vietnam as a cook, but fast-talked his way into becoming a combat photographer.

He photographed countless bland military ceremonies, but also took reconnaissance photos and scenes of frantic battle. He saw dying soldiers through a lens.

“It was almost like capturing their spirit before they died,” he said.

Coming home was even worse, he said.

“I was spit on when I got off the airplane,” he said. “It was less depressing when I was in Vietnam then when I came home.”

But he remained in the Army for about a year, then sang and played guitar to help pay his way through college and finally embarked on a career in art. Although Jennings, a diver, has always loved the sea, his destiny was set one day as he walked along the beach in Oregon. He happened upon a dead gray whale.

“Its eye was open. It looked so human to me. I saw the wisdom of its life in a whole other world. It was very spiritual, very moving to me. It was a very personal thing between me and a dead whale.”

He resolved to paint sea life and introduce viewers to “the entirely new planet” he had discovered through the whale’s eye.

Jennings’ murals and paintings are exotic, romanticized and deeply colorful, showing creatures jumping and moving in utter freedom. Beneath them lies more than a pro-environment statement; they also show the artist as the boy trapped inside the box, yearning for things of beauty outside captivity.

“I’m obsessed with freedom,” said Jennings, who declares that his paintings are “almost a spiritual payment back to myself.”

“I’m obsessed with freedom,” said Jennings, who declares that his paintings are “almost a spiritual payment back to myself.”

Bu he also has a practical side, figuring that his gratis work on the mural will bring him attention and increase sales of his art.

A local businessman, William McMahon, is donating the cost of paints and materials for the mural. With the Swiss paints costing $110 a gallon, the finished mural is expected to cost at least $35,000.

The artist said the special paint never chips or peels, will last 20 years and lose only 5% of its luster. He said he wants the mural to be a gift that will endure.