Right up front I’ll admit that I’ve learned, and continue to learn, a little something (or sometimes a lot of something) from my cartoonist colleagues, past and present. James Thurber’s work happens to be the most influential; seeing his work when I was a teenager yanked me away from the influences that had fueled me til then. Back then I was filling up sketchbooks, drawing daily. The drawings pre-Thurber were complicated, dense, awkwardly drawn; I was blending all sorts of influences. The result was a mess (stuff stays with you, and to this day I won’t deny some early influences still influence).
What I saw in Thurber’s work was what I perceived as a direct connection from his creative self — that thing you can’t see on an x-ray — to his drawings. I decided my work would be better off if I eliminated the middleman — all that thinking was exhausting. Here are a couple of things that happened to and with my work after first seeing Thurber’s “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?” one summer day back at the dawn of the 1970s.
- I began to draw, at times, with my eyes closed just for a moment or two. I suppose this could be considered an exercise in excising learned “techniques.” (Peter Arno thought the same way in his run up to The New Yorker, wanting to get rid of the “slick junk” that he’d been doing on paper. I doubt Arno ever drew with his eyes closed though!). To this day I sometimes close my eyes when adding pencil to my drawings. What happens happens.
- I allowed what I was drawing to just show up, like a stranger’s knock at the door. I’ve always found it inspiring that two of Thurber’s most famous drawings happened by accident (The Seal In The Bedroom, and “That’s my first wife up there, and this is the present Mrs. Harris”). If I suddenly felt like drawing a pterodactyl in a coffee shop, I’d draw it. If that drawing was put aside because something more interesting showed up — another puzzle — then great. I’d put the coffee shop aside, and follow what came to me next.