This may sound a little strange, but my father, who is in amazing illustrator and painter, is also a long-time police officer. I remember a period of time when he was using something other than yearbooks for inspiration...boxes of old mug shots.

Have you ever tried drawing with a quill? I've seen articles in books about how to cut a pen point on one but I've never tried it. I wonder what it would feel like.

I hear you re: the variations on a similarly composed theme. I've been sketching 2"x2" thumbnails of my dad's old 50's/60's/70's classical music albums, of which I have hundreds in the attic. The historicity (ouch) of the graphic composition fascinates me, as well all the variations on dead guys - amazing how many ways the same bust of Mozart can be interpreted.

I started doing this as a riff off of your meditations on possessions... thinking that if I was going to hold onto such an extensive, bulky collection, it had better pay its own way in my life somehow. Because they were my dad's, and they're these beautiful objects rendered fairly worthless only by overuse and technology... I can't just throw them out. So every so often I retreat to my skylit attic studio and draw record albums.

Synchronicity: My boyfriend said the last batch were very R. Crumb-like.

Last night when I saw the yearbook portraits you were creating, i was wishing we could wallpaper a wall or two with them. You may not agree with that idea but what about a wall of drawings somewhere here?

Think about it. I'll help install it if you like!

PLG

danny, i came across this quote by the poet MARY OLIVER and thought of you.

"I've said before that the angel doesn't sit on your shoulder unless the pencil's in your hand. ... And in truth that [is only] given after years of desiring it, being open to it, and walking toward it....Yet you approach the task with a sense of great responsibility....
Oh, yes. It's my responsibility if I choose to do it, to write as well as I possibly can. I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination. ... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision." mary oliver

There's nothing quite like writing and drawing with a handmade pen. Be it a quill, bamboo or just a sharpened stick dipped in ink.

I like the idea of drawing faces from old yearbooks. The mug shots too, but I will never find that source! When I am at long and boring meetings I like to stare at the various faces. I find it interesting that though we have the same components, eyes, nose, mouth, we are all put together so differently. Oval heads, round, rectangular. Deep set eyes, heavy lidded. And so on. I am fascinated with why we all look so unalike. When I can, I draw them.
ceevee

Funny! Last week when I organized my studio, I came across many bamboo pens as well as some waterproof higgins ink!
Last night I did figure drawing with sewing machine again! I had a moment where I dropped my idea of how it was supposed to look (as though I were drawing with a pencil) and did two really nice sewings, I mean drawings!

Spalding Institute! I grew up in Peoria and my tiny, Catholic grade school was in the Spalding High School building.

Laura