Liza Donnelly Live Draws Coney Island’s Cyclone
Wearing her CBS Resident Cartoonist hat, Liza Donnelly recently visited the Coney Island boardwalk to live draw various sights, including the famous Cyclone, which is celebrating its 90th birthday today. Click here to see all of her CBS Coney Island drawings
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An Arno Puzzle Piece Surfaces
When I completed my biography of Peter Arno in the early months of 2016, there were still a few unsolved pieces of the Arno puzzle. One of them was the drawing shown here. While still attending The Hotchkiss School, Arno was awarded First Prize For Art in a Yale prep school competition. This drawing appeared in the June 1, 1921 Yale Record, approximately fifteen months before he began his first and last year at Yale. It’s an important link piece connecting two phases of his life (Hotchkiss and Yale) when art began to grab hold of him and he began to grab hold of his art. You can see that his drawing ability was already well along: his expertise in the use of light and shadow, his confidence in execution, and of course the presence of the drawing itself on the page. All the ingredients (save one: sex) in place for the decades of beautiful art to come. The Nightmare — A Broken String could’ve easily appeared in any early issue of The New Yorker. Winning the Yale prize was important enough to Arno that he mentioned it in his unpublished memoir, I Reached for the Moon.
My thanks to two Yalies: Don Watson, who found the drawing, and Michael Gerber, who passed it along to me. Mr. Watson has been working on a comprehensive biography of all the major cartoonists of The Yale Record, and Mr. Gerber is the tirelessly enthusiastic Publisher of The American Bystander.
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MAD Update
After asking Whither MAD just a few days ago, there’s this news from Tom Richmond’s blog.