Back in the early 1970s, before I saw my first James Thurber drawing, when I was filling sketchbooks with work (unlike today when I fill loose single sheets of paper with drawings), I was, graphically, all over the place: a combo of what I’d taken in. And that’s essential: the taking in and trying out. But the work then wasn’t going anywhere that I could see — it was directionless. I could spend hours happily engaged in filling up pages, but the work wasn’t challenging. Fun, yes, but not challenging. Here’s an example of what I was up to then:
On the summer’s day in 1973 when my friend, Matthew walked over to me with a copy of The Thurber Carnival and pointed to Thurber’s “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?” the kind of drawing you see above ended for me. The change was immediately obvious, graphically, as seen in the drawing below (from early 1974), where I not only discarded a lot of drawing for very little, I aped the hat that appears next to the hippo in the Millmoss drawing.
What you can’t see in this drawing is the larger direction I’d suddenly found. That would come soon after, when I’d tossed myself fully into the world of New Yorker cartoons. That education taught me how to blend words with drawings.
Returning to Thurber’s Millmoss drawing, it threw down a challenge: draw towards something that works. It’s that simple.