Clarence Simonsen

Clarence Simonsen was not a wartime painter. He was born in a farmhouse six miles from Acme, Alberta, on March 24, 1944, months before the bombers he would spend his life documenting flew their last missions over Europe. He never sat on a hardstand in England. He never mixed Army-issue enamel in a Nissen hut. By the time he was old enough to hold a brush, nearly every aircraft he cared about had already been cut apart and melted into ingots.

That is the fact that shapes everything about him. The men who painted nose art in the war were creating folk art on machines that were expected to die. Clarence Simonsen came along a generation later and made it his job to prove the art had existed at all.

He grew up captivated by three things: airplanes, history, and drawing. As a teenager he discovered the pin-up work of Alberto Vargas, the same illustrator whose long-legged women were being copied onto the noses of B-17s an ocean away. He had no formal art training. What he had was a good eye and the patience to copy a thing exactly.

In 1962 he joined the Canadian Army at Kingston, Ontario, and served in the Provost Corps, the military police. In 1965 he was posted to Cyprus with the United Nations peacekeeping force for a six-month tour and came home with a UN medal. It was there, painting unit cartoons and his first large mural, that the hobby became a craft. He would later work for the Toronto Metropolitan Police and finish his working life as an armored-car guard with Loomis in Calgary, retiring at sixty-seven. The nose art was never his job. It was the thing he did for fifty years around his job.

The work started with a question no book could answer. Who painted these? The names were not recorded. The Army had no Military Occupational Specialty for artist. The men who did the painting were classified as mechanics and armorers, and when the war ended they went home to warehouses and gas stations and vanished into ordinary American life. Their art vanished faster. Of more than 200,000 surplus aircraft, the vast majority were flown to storage fields at Kingman, Arizona, and Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, stripped of engines and instruments, sliced apart with guillotines, and pushed into furnaces that ran 1,250 degrees around the clock. The aluminum came out the other side as 1,500-pound ingots. The painted women went with it.

Simonsen understood that the artists themselves were the only remaining archive, and they were old and getting older. So he found them. Through a nose-art column he wrote for the 8th Air Force News, he surfaced the men the histories had left out and asked them to talk. The most important of them was Tony Starcer, the line mechanic of the 91st Bombardment Group who had painted the Memphis Belle and roughly 130 other B-17s and then given up art entirely to work in a California warehouse for thirty-six years. Simonsen interviewed Starcer in 1979. The two stayed in contact by phone and by letter from 1980 until Starcer's death in 1986, and it was through that correspondence that the real story of the Memphis Belle's nose art came out: not a portrait of Margaret Polk but a George Petty pin-up, the Telephone Girl, copied off a magazine page. Much of what is now documented about Starcer is documented because Clarence Simonsen picked up a phone and wrote it down. The column also flushed out dozens of Starcer's lost and forgotten pieces, images that would otherwise have existed only in the memory of one aging man.

This is the pattern of his life's work. He did not recreate the art from imagination. He built each piece on evidence: veterans' testimony, wartime photographs, the artists' own recollections, unit records. Then he painted it. And he insisted on painting it on the right surface.

Simonsen did not work on canvas or board. He worked on aluminum cut from the skin of the actual bombers, the salvaged remnants of the same class of aircraft that had carried the original art into combat. He would research a piece down to its squadron and serial number, then reproduce it stroke for stroke on the curved metal, adding his own signature elements to every panel: a silhouette of the bomber type and the squadron insignia, so that the recreation carried its own provenance. The tactile logic of it is exact. The art had been born on aluminum and lost with aluminum, and he was bringing it back on aluminum. By the account published in Canadian Aviator Magazine in 2005, he had by then painted more than 500 recreated works, every one of them on original skin from a salvaged bomber. Reported figures for a fifty-year career run higher still.

His research reached print in three books that became reference works for the whole field. He was a major contributor to Vintage Aircraft Nose Art: Ready for Duty in 1987. In 1991 he co-authored The History of Aircraft Nose Art, also published as Aircraft Nose Art from World War I to Today, with the aviation historian Jeffrey L. Ethell. That collaboration matters. Ethell was one of the most respected aviation writers of his generation, the man who found and published original wartime color photographs of nose art before he was killed in a P-38 crash in 1997. Their book gathered more than 400 photographs and, crucially, interviews with surviving nose artists, the same voices Simonsen had spent years tracking down. In 2002 he published RAF and RCAF Aircraft Nose Art in World War II, carrying the same method into the British and Canadian records that American writers had largely ignored.

He gave lectures to whoever would have him: elementary schools, art colleges, museums, galas. His recreations traveled. They have been displayed around the world, including at the Smithsonian, and the largest concentration of them lives at the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alberta, where dozens of his panels hang as a standing collection. His personal archive of nose-art research remains one of the largest in existence.

Set his work against what was lost and the scale of it comes clear. When the Kingman smelters closed, a B-24 called The Dragon and His Tail, the largest single piece of nose art ever painted on an American combat aircraft, sat for a while off to the side. The scrapping crews hoped someone would buy it. No one did. Sarkis Bartigian's dragon, running the whole length of the fuselage, was chopped apart and fed into the furnace, the last of Kingman's thousands of bombers. Of the tens of thousands of aircraft that carried painted art, only a handful of original panels survive anywhere, a few dozen hacked out of fuselages with a fire axe before the metal went to the melt. Everything else exists as photographs, or as testimony, or as nothing at all.

Clarence Simonsen spent fifty years standing against that erasure with a paintbrush and a notebook. He could not save the originals. Almost no one could. What he could do was find the men while they still lived, write down what they remembered, and paint the vanished art back onto the metal it had died on, one heavily researched panel at a time. He did it for five decades, around a full working life, and he did it well enough that the field simply calls him Mr. Nose Art.

He died at home in Airdrie, Alberta, on September 13, 2024, at the age of eighty. He left behind more than 500 recreations, three books, an archive, and a documented record of an art form that the United States government had, quite deliberately, tried to reduce to aluminum ingots. The bombers are gone. The men who painted them are gone. The art is here because one Canadian who was born too late to see it refused to let it disappear.