When I was an illustrator, I wrote and illustrated a cartoon strip called "Attorneyman - World's Sharpest Attorney." This drawing shows Attorneyman about to be "tied up" by Lou Sends a/k/a Loose Ends. Being very compulsive (but not as compulsive as Seymour Chwast), I rarely leave loose ends. However, the loose end here is that I do in fact leave loose ends -- even in my paintings. I say to myself (as did Loose Ends to Attorneyman), "You'll take care of it in the morning." Then in the morning I start on another painting because a paint rough is more exciting than finishing touches. Sometimes I never go back to the previous painting. A few months down the road I'll take a guilty look at the unfinished painting, declare it finished, and it looks just fine.
More loose ends: My father was a pianist in addition to being a surgeon. He had a very strange affectation to his playing though. The music he played had no beginning and no end. He just sat down and started playing in the middle of a piece, played for a while, stopped before it ended and then got up and left the piano. We called his pieces "Harrison's unfinished melodies." They had loose ends; were unpredictable, mysterious and sounded just fine.
Loose ends help create more art, mysterious music, and are not so bad at all.
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Love the cartoons. Knew you did paintings and portraits, but cartoons are a nice balance to sketch art.
ReplyDeleteI have known a cartoonist for years, from Mt. Vernon, NY, that did them back in WWII while in the Army. He did them for "The Stars and Stripes". Later his work was a regular in "The Saturday Evening Post", "Life", "The New Yorker" and many medical and legal journals, etc.
He had an uncanny ability to cartoon your stories. I had to be careful what I said with him nearby.
His name is Thomas Zibelli and penned his works "Tom Zip".
JB