‘A lot of things happened I never figured on.’

Manny Alpert was a commercial artist, but he wanted more. In 1952 he left his job and took his savings and his paints and brushes to an island in the Mediterranean. He was looking for style or maybe a deeper meaning in his art. What he found was not exactly what he expected. Alpert, now retired, lives with his wife, Eva, in North Hollywood.

During the Depression most of us were all-concerned about earning a living. Just bread, you know. Jobs were scarce. In the back of my mind was always the fact that I wanted to be an artist, a fine artist. But it was sort of impossible because earning a living was more important. My idea was to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. They would send enough money home to support the family, and I’d get about $5 a week spending money.

When I got out of the CCC I went to art school to study art as a career. After three months studying I was lucky enough to get a job in a shoe store for $16 a week doing shoe cards or posters. Everybody was trying to advertise their products during the Depression.

About this time the war interrupted all my plans. I joined the Seabees, a construction battalion. They put me in the camouflage division because I was an artist.

After the war I did some free-lancing, and finally I got a job as an artist for the Los Angeles County Health Department that had a pretty fair salary. I had a permanent job, so I gave it everything I had.

But I was determined to put together enough money so I could go somewhere and work out some of the ideas I had in fine arts. I heard about this island where you could live on $600 a year so I figured, wow! I could make that without too much trouble. It took me about five years of saving and not being extravagant. I didn’t even own a car. I ended up with about $10,000 or $12,000. And I went to this island of Ibiza near Majorca in the Mediterranean.

I felt I needed about five years to accomplish what I wanted. But a lot of things happened I never figured on when I was on the island.

A young lady came to Ibiza on vacation, and I guess we fell in love.

It was about the first year I was there that I met her. She went back to London and we corresponded. Within three months she came back and we got married. We rented a house on the island and lived there and had two children. That sort of stopped me from doing what I had planned, but I tried to keep painting as much as I could.

The children were born in the house. The doctor came to the home, and I had to be with the wife all the time during the birth of both children. Then it wasn’t in style, but it was just a matter of necessity. If anything had gone wrong, I had a taxicab waiting.

The future looked pretty bleak. It just took more money than I had originally figured on to raise a family, so eventually I did run out of cash and I came back to the States to try to find a job as a commercial artist.

At first I didn’t think I had accomplished anything worthwhile on the island. But people, professionals and other artists, tell me that I did develop a style. You don’t realize what you’ve accomplished until years afterwards. I didn’t think I’d done much, but it all helps.

There seems to be no way to change the past, so I just have to accept it and get what I can get out of it. I was used to being a bachelor, and all my plans were to go ahead with my art on my own without raising a family. It was difficult for me to become a father and raise a family, but the wife is very capable and she took care of a lot of things.

The situation has improved a lot for me, and some people are beginning to like my work. I have a chance to show my work to the public at this gallery I belong to and keep painting and do what I really want to do.