Moving on... Getting into the Business
Article Transcript
Without a doubt, there are a great number of ways the members of ISCA have become active caricaturists. Each individual has had unique experiences and has been given opportunities that may be somewhat similar to those of others in the organization. When I look back at the events that brought me into this business, first I see smiling housewives standing in the backyards of their homes while delicious odors fill the air. These ladies are enjoying the sight of two small boys, about 8 years of age, pulling a toy wagon up the driveway toward their kitchen doors. On the wagon they have placed a cardboard box and a folder in which they have inserted a pack of pages carefully detached from a coloring book and decorated with wax crayons, colored pencils, and watercolor pens. Some of the women are willing to make a trade—two homemade cookies for three colorful papers. Others tell the boys to be on their way, but the “sales” they achieve keep them going door-to-door, excitedly putting cookies of various flavors: peanut butter, coconut, chocolate chip and some popular specialties — like cookies with bright red maraschino cherries — into the box on their wagon.
Add a couple years to the lifetimes of these enterprising schoolboys. Now I see a smiling sixth-grade teacher. She teaches Social Studies, which in the past had been known as History and Geography, with a dash of Civics tossed into the mix. She hands the older boy a reference book; he pages through it until he reaches the chapter dealing with the American Civil War. He selects a photograph of Abraham Lincoln seated on an impressive White House chair. For the next two weeks, he stays after school every day to work on a drawing that fills a 3-foot-by-3-foot chalkboard panel located in the rear of the sixth-grade classroom. The Social Studies teacher makes a point of asking fellow instructors to take a look at the chalk drawing. Their complimentary remarks encourage the young artist to take on more and bigger projects.
An older sister completes her high school requirements at the age of 16 and heads for Chicago, where she enrolls in a teachers college. Mom likes to keep in touch with her daughter, and suggests that some cartoons be drawn and put in the mail. Within a week or so, the family receives a letter from Chicago. The girls in the dorm are quite impressed with the comical drawing, and several request drawings they can place on the walls of their rooms. The budding artist creates more cartoons and honors every request from his sister’s fellow students. His drawing skills continue to improve.
The years roll on. High school activities, football and basketball games, dances, dating, fill the young artist’s schedule. The faculty adviser for the yearbook appoints him to the position of Official Yearbook Cartoonist. Several fellows join his committee, and they all have a good time creating single-panel gag cartoons that have high school themes. Our hero can’t resist the urge to place images of classmates and members of the high school faculty and administration in the cartoons. A new word is added to his vocabulary: CARICATURE.
And so it was that the experiences and influences that led me along the way to becoming a caricature artist started very early in my life. Those housewives who got such a kick out of our coloring book pages being “sold” for home-made cookies had no idea that they were putting my pal Bob and me on paths heading for a satisfying and fully enjoyable business. Now it is my turn to be the instigator of events and situations that will open opportunities for some other future caricaturist.
About 10 years ago, Shirley, the grandmother of my friend Justin and a fellow member of our church, suggested that we go out to the edge of town to take a look at a full-size highway billboard that carried a large reproduction of an anti-smoking message that Justin had created. He was the winner of a poster contest conducted by STATS, a nonprofit organization sponsored by Mercy General Hospital and its services committee. Justin was 13 years old and had just finished eighth grade at Orchard View High School. A woman representing the STATS organization had visited his classroom earlier in the year, calling on the students to enter the contest. Designs were evaluated by panels of middle school students and Community Foundation staff. We did as Shirley recommended, and were impressed with Justin’s artwork. A few weeks later, Shirley and her husband brought Justin and his mother, Maureen, to our home for a visit. Justin and I got acquainted and spent some time sketching in my basement studio and looking at drawings I had done throughout the years at art fairs and other events.
My next contact with Justin took place after he had a summer job drawing caricatures at the amusement park north of Muskegon, a resort called “Michigan’s Adventure” operated by the company that runs Cedar Point in Ohio. Although he was just a sophomore in high school, he had been hired to join a team of experienced artists, drawing caricatures regularly at the park. Generally, young artists were given some training by the park’s personnel, but Justin was hired at the last minute when the park was opening for the season and so was put to work immediately without prior orientation. In the fall of that year, Justin and his grandparents came to our home again. It was great fun to hear Justin telling of his adventures at Michigan’s Adventure. I asked him to demonstrate the method he used, and I videotaped his step-bystep way of creating black-and-white pen-andink caricatures and recorded his comments on a VHS cassette.
Early last year, Justin came to my rescue when I found myself unable to keep a drawing commitment. I had agreed to do four pen-andink “heads only” caricatures. The client had provided good, sharp photos of four young men who were to be participants in a wedding ceremony. The date when these drawings had to be ready was fast approaching. I completed one of the four faces, but before I could get a second drawing under way, my plans were interrupted by an emergency surgery for a hernia, making the project impossible for me to handle. Believe it or not, I had drawn a 32"x40" pastel chalk poster of the surgeon who was doing the repair, his wife and two daughters, more than twenty-five years before, when this doctor was welcomed to Muskegon by his associates. I’m glad I had this operation after all those years, because by now the doctor surely had enough experience that I could feel confident that he would do the job right, and he could use up-to-date techniques. He did not sew me back together, nor use staples; he closed me up using glue! My wife contacted Justin, and he went to work on the three remaining drawings. He finished the project in a timely fashion, and when he received the payment for the work, he handed me one-fourth of the fee. I should have insisted that he keep that portion of the money, too, as a reward for taking over so readily, but, “Ve gets too soon old and too late schmart.”
Shirley and John are very proud of their grandson’s achievements. They told me that Justin was planning to attend college to study art. He first went to Muskegon Community College, where he took classes in art history, painting and drawing. He then transferred to Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, where he is working toward a bachelor’s degree in illustration. After taking time off working at a video rental store to build up his funds, he is ready to return to Kendall to continue his education.
Justin has been visiting with me quite regularly, and, with the cooperation of ISCA officials, I’ve given him a number of copies of back issues of our EF magazine. We’ve sat down together to view DVDs and VHS tapes showing activities at NCN and ISCA conventions, and caricature artists at work in locations such as Busch Gardens in Florida using videotapes supplied by fellow ISCA member Jorge Lassus. I gave him a good supply of pastel chalks and a stack of drawing paper, my “Trojan Horse” drawing bench, and my “art on the go” fold-up easel, similar to the item described in the summer 2011 EF article written by Sean Gardner (pages 10-15). These supplies, tools and pieces of equipment have been very useful to me, but I can no longer handle them. I’m very pleased that I can put them into the capable hands of my friend Justin.
We caricaturists are a very special bunch of people. We gladly share friendly relations with each other, demonstrate our techniques and help each other improve our skills, and enjoy the creativity that goes into our work. We simply cannot keep these positive qualities to ourselves, as though they were the private property of individual artists. I urge the members of ISCA to seek ways to build a continually improving trade association, and be sure to provide encouragement to young artists who will join us in the joys of caricaturing.
NOTE: My pal, Bob, lived just a few houses down the street from my parents’ home. His folks went all out to encourage not only their son but me as well to create art. His mom did not mind cleaning up after us when we got a little wild with our finger painting projects and spattered her kitchen with paint. Bob’s parents decorated the walls of their house with Bob’s artwork. When we were in our teens, they paid the costly tuition price so Bob could attend art school at the Albright- Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y. After his military service in Vietnam, Bob settled in Texas where he painted large canvases depicting the beauty of the American Southwest.
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