sketchbook

Until a few years ago I carried a sketchbook with me nearly everywhere because I have a compulsion to scribble and also a shitty memory. Before I forget where I put the sketchbooks I thought I’d haul out some drawings to talk about.

That’s the remnant apple tree from Brian the Lion’s Catskill place where trout fishing was legendary but orchards had waned. I liked the little birdhouse and the tree’s defiant eccentric gestures; I was channeling a (Calvin and Hobbes) Watterson-like line because he was a genius at natural scenes to casually enhance his genius for making the funny pages transcendent cerebral-slapstick mirth.

Here’s a pair of kids in Bryant Park (behind NYC’s main library) just grabbing a bite. I try to stay unobtrusive while drawing folks, and had succeeded through most of this quick sketch until the kid on the right glanced up and made eye contact—which I managed to incorporate so I think it has an almost snapshot feel.

Hiroshi was so fascinating to watch that I had to go talk to him after whipping off the janky likeness of him—he was actually in his mid 30s and not nine like the drawing makes him seem—although he was youthfully intense in spirit.

Behold “Poe,” the youngest arrival among five in a household of poet-monikered cats. He stubbornly—nay, stupidly refused to acknowledge the benign alpha rule of Ginsberg, who’d survived many a battle in Brooklyn alleycat gangland before resigning to quasi-domestication… Poe impudently failed to process the fate he tempted with the old lion and was assigned a new home where I’m told he brought much impish delight before blowing through all nine lives and meeting an early demise.

While I was making a decent living in the commercial art world I catalogued many sketchbook entries about the seemingly inexorable political march to where we find ourselves today, per illustration above.

I had parallel thoughts in so doing; one, was how passionate political cartoonist Theodor Geisel was in raising alarms about Nazis and the America First movement in the 1940s, and the other was that his enduring fame later in life came from ministering to the healthy imaginations as children’s book writer/illustrator Dr. Seuss.

This stray entry was circa the same two-decade old period…critical thinking still evidencing a young Republican life informed by Mad magazine…

…while another random doodle coincided with Watchmen though at the time I’d never heard of it—superheroes had all become deprecated and hunted anti-heroes, so Uj it turned out had gotten lucky…

…and this one just bloomed up as I was finishing a sandwich in the park—the beauty of NYC is how many stories are happening in the wide open if you get out and open your eyes to them.

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I’m gonna break the fourth wall and ask for likes on this—(only if you actually liked it). Words and pictures are pretty abstract connections without feedback and some feedback would encourage me back out with the sketchbook. Thanks for considering it and thanks for being here.

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