Birthday Suite

Tomorrow is my 41st birthday. Another year older and, hopefully, wiser. The intelligent, beautiful Annie and the curious, cuddly, and energetic Alex help keep me young. Every day that I get on the treadmill and get the blood pumping, I do it for myself and for them. I plan on sticking around a good, long time to enjoy every possible minute with both of them.

Since I usually commemorate the birthdays of great artists with a selection of their works, I decided to commemorate my own birthday by inflicting on the world a suite of my own amateurish works. If you’re a fan of Edward Weston’s photography, you may recognize my homage to one of his signature works in the drawing above. As I kid, I wanted to draw like Neal Adams and work on Batman comic books for the rest of my life. I still would like to draw like Neal Adams, but I’d “settle” for drawing like Michelangelo. Since Alex was born, I haven’t had as much time to draw, paint watercolors, or do pastels, but that time will come when he’s old enough to sit out on the deck and we can do art side by side. That’s a nice future memory I have to look forward to. Meanwhile, I keep a set of pencils, kneaded eraser, and sketch book in my desk at work and wander out to the park on nice days to draw whatever strikes me. The statues of Independence National Historical Park make great models, since they never move an inch. I’ll never make a living at art, but the feeling of blissfully losing myself for a stretch of time, concentrating on capturing light and shade as it defines a form, is more than enough recompense.

[All of these drawings were done in graphite pencils on white paper. I photographed rather than scanned them, so the reproductions are OK but not great, like the drawings themselves.]