Mom Junked Andy Warhol

Nik Mills, 61, is the son of Yaroslava Surmach Mills— a prolific and renowned artist, often identified by only her first name, who made the recipe cards shown here, the image on the cover of this magazine, and countless other works.

My mother worked at the family bookstore as a young woman. After studying at Cooper Union, she was the art editor at Humpty Dumpty, a children’s magazine. Andy Warhol came to her for a job repeatedly, but she didn’t hire him. He would send her illustrations of custom things—a parade of insects on a roll of paper writing happy bug day, miss surmach. He tried to seduce her with all these illustrations, and she would throw them in the garbage. She threw away about a dozen personalized illustrations from him. To say she is a folk artist doesn’t cover it. You can’t cubbyhole her. You could call her a stained-glass artist, a children’s-book illustrator, a reverse glass painter, a master calligrapher, an icon-maker. Me being an artist, it was kind of a given. There wasn’t any other option. She dragged me through the museums of Europe, and she’d sit me down in the Prado and go explore. She’d bring me to the Dutch masters and say, “See how it’s just such a smoosh of paint? As you back away, that smoosh becomes the highlight on the edge of that vase. Isn’t that amazing? These guys could make a smoosh into a spark of light.”