Hags and Hagiography

I write and draw a monthly neighbor profile for my neighborhood paper. I think of it as a sort of people magazine for ordinary people. I'm interested in people who do interesting things, and especially people who have ideas or have made things that will let civilization endure.

The three scans come from Grosset and Dunlap's 1931 offering, Minute Biographies: Intimate Glimpses into the Lives or 150 Famous Men and Women by Samuel Nisenson and Alfred Parker, and from a show of paintings by Rob Shetterely, Americans Who Tell the Truth. Some of those 150 men's and women's stock has gone up, and some down, in the seventy-nine years since Santa gave my eleven year old father Minute Biographies; Adolph Hitler is not among the 150, but Vladimir Lenin is included as the "Russian Emancipator." Shetterly's oil portraits are attractive, and his choices are exemplars of integrity and justice. My own preferences would be of people who know how to expedite those virtues in society.

Drawings Of The Bergstrom Kids

I expected these drawings to take about eight hours. These are the Bergstrom kids, grand niece and nephews of a friend from one of my drawing groups, Gillian, Ike, Gary, and Mikey. Instead it surprised me that I couldn't get the proportions right. Working from snapshots seems like a separate skill from drawing live models, and I unknowingly seem to have come to rely on the proportions and landmarks of adult faces. And I just couldn't catch the perspective of Mikey's far eye. The stakes were higher than usual, because I was drawing pictures of a stranger's beloved children. Freaked me out, and took half a year.

These are great kids, bright and polite. I especially enjoyed meeting Gillian, who is a fearless and outgoing baby. I am enormously pleased to get them off my easel!

Roark Portrait Series