For most of my professional life as an artist and an art teacher, I have found time to pull away from my studio or classroom, go to the city, the beach, or parks and sketch. Armed at times with a camera but usually with pen and ink, pencil, wash, and a “spit and rub” technique, I indulge myself with random sketches of people selling things, panhandling, sunbathing, gossiping, resting, waiting, daydreaming. Some of them are homeless, the lonely, the derelicts, the has-beens. Others are extroverts, sidewalk philosophers, peddlers and poets. Some of these have reemerged as themes in later paintings, or as subjects with which to demonstrate a variety of techniques to my students.
Occasionally, to keep the flow when weather or other conditions prevent me from mingling with real people, I draw inspiration from newspaper or magazine photos, hoping my personal rendering of the subject transcends the borrowed image. These pieces are my private responses to to images I have been witnessing for years. In a way they are are intrusions into the moods and feelings of the people they portray, so I have had a reluctance to show them, and kept them mainly for myself hidden in notebooks scattered around my studio. Someday they could be published for the enjoyment of others.
Only for Myself: Sketches From My Notebooks
