Remember those magic slates kids drew on with a plastic stylus where you could erase the image by lifting up the sheet of acetate that covered a waxy clay-like surface underneath? In 1961, after our boat from China docked in San Francisco, we took a train to New York the next day and that’s what kept me occupied on that long ride. I’ve always drawn and loved art. I grew up surrounded by Chinese ink brush paintings & calligraphy in my grandparents’ home and made regular visits to museums.
Strength as well as personality & character is exhibited in writing with ink & brush.
There were also book collections of cartoons by Peter Arno, George Price and various artists from the British publication Punch. Perhaps this is why I’ve always preferred line because it was clean, expressive and confident.
The Art Students League in New York City was my first formal introduction to drawing where the instructor Gregory D’Alessio recommended a book by Kimon Nicolaides called The Natural Way to Draw. It advocated contour drawing where you took a pencil and followed the form of the model as if you were touching their shape without looking at your paper or raising your pencil from the paper. The goal was to improve your observational skills so that you paid attention to what was in front of you and not some concept of what you were seeing. (A more advanced exercise was to draw the reverse of what you saw. If the model’s profile was facing right, we had to draw it facing left.) From that training, after I received a standard Pelikan ink fountain pen as a birthday present, I began a lifetime habit of sketching people on buses and trains or planes.
Sample illustration for exercise manual. Lady on a bus in the Netherlands.
Marker drawings while working in the studio at an advertising agency. I enjoyed drawing beautiful women for a cosmetics account, among other clients. The drawings or “comps” (composites) were for campaign presentations only so I have few samples. (A portfolio was also ruined by water damage in our last move from abroad.)
Watercolor painting of a skull (missing some blue overtones in this scan).
Current work on a story idea.
Manet (one of my favorite painters) said that there are no lines in nature, only areas of color, one against another. Many artists prefer either line or color in interpreting the world. I remain thrilled by linework in making images.
Thanks for reading!
You are so talented. Although I don’t possess your talent in the visual arts, I have great appreciation and an eye for it. I joke around with people and say that the only artistic talent I have is with my mouth, that is, vocal. I have always enjoyed singing from my very earliest years and actually enjoy speaking, as I don’t have “fear of man” or stage fright.