What makes a line funny? Or not? Looking at my father’s work immediately raises this question, in part because only some of his drawings are humorous. In others, he produces “serious” images. The distinction among these approaches is clear—but how? Is it the shorthand? The sketchy quality? The relation between the image and what it represents? Or some inflection in the cartoon lines that indicates a wink-wink understanding that they are to be taken lightly?
Oh my God, I remember the portraits of you and David just as well as the memorized the paintings I grew up with in my own house a mere two and a half blocks away, and looking at these took me right back to scurrying home in the deepening dark across uneven wet brick and cement sidewalks from an afternoon in your company.
Breakfast. My brothers and I with our raison bran or pop tarts eaten by ourselves standing in the darkened kitchen. Your house, the five of you seated around the table in the bright dining room with a hot breakfast. It is both interesting and compelling to know your father in a different way from the terrifying large whiskery man, who, over fried eggs and bacon, pointing with his index finger would bid me kiss his tongue-protruded-cheek mornings when I came by so that we could, in the earliest years, walk to City Center School together. I wish now that I had known him as a person not just your father so different from mine.
Thanks for this shared memory!
Oh my God, I remember the portraits of you and David just as well as the memorized the paintings I grew up with in my own house a mere two and a half blocks away, and looking at these took me right back to scurrying home in the deepening dark across uneven wet brick and cement sidewalks from an afternoon in your company.
Breakfast. My brothers and I with our raison bran or pop tarts eaten by ourselves standing in the darkened kitchen. Your house, the five of you seated around the table in the bright dining room with a hot breakfast. It is both interesting and compelling to know your father in a different way from the terrifying large whiskery man, who, over fried eggs and bacon, pointing with his index finger would bid me kiss his tongue-protruded-cheek mornings when I came by so that we could, in the earliest years, walk to City Center School together. I wish now that I had known him as a person not just your father so different from mine.