from my sketchbook: joseph kearns

Character actor Joseph Kearns began his career in the heyday of radio in the unlikely role of a pipe organ player. He soon was performing regularly on radio programs like I Married Joan, December Bride, Burns and Allen, Sam Spade and many others. He was the mysterious announcer “The Man in Black” on the radio …

Continue reading ‘from my sketchbook: joseph kearns’ »

IF: cultivate

This week’s Illustration Friday challenge word is “cultivate”. In the nearly thirty years that I have known my father-in-law, he has told me this joke countless times. Whenever a piece of conversation triggers something in his memory that reminds him that this joke would be an appropriate anecdote, he delivers it as though it was …

Continue reading ‘IF: cultivate’ »

from my sketchbook: will the circle be unbroken

2010 came to a close last week, but it began almost 35 years ago, when I was in high school. After getting tossed out of the majority of my academic classes, I gravitated towards the art department. There, among those paint-splattered desks and rolls of brown kraft paper, I felt comfortable and had as much …

Continue reading ‘from my sketchbook: will the circle be unbroken’ »

from my sketchbook: josh pincus is confessing

I have spent years expanding my blog with observances of the quirkiness of my surroundings, chronicling the deaths of those once celebrated and now forgotten, stories from my past and, of course, my silly drawings. In that time, I presented my opinioned views on religion, of both my own and those of which I am not a …

Continue reading ‘from my sketchbook: josh pincus is confessing’ »

from my sketchbook: jack nance

My wife has celebrated 28 birthdays since we met. Last year, we enjoyed a wonderfully intimate concert by banjo impresario Tony Trischka at the elegant, historic Elkins Estate, around the corner from our house. Two years ago, we spent a wonderful birthday in New York City. We went to a huge street festival on Sixth Avenue, wandered around …

Continue reading ‘from my sketchbook: jack nance’ »

IF: old-fashioned

You know those time-lapse scenes in movies from your parents’’ youth? The ones that show a montage of events beginning with a spinning newspaper hurtling towards the camera, stopping to display a significant headline splashed across the front page in big, attention-getting letters? How quaint and dated they seemed. Remember the boy on the street …

Continue reading ‘IF: old-fashioned’ »

from my sketchbook: racism is alive and well

Racists are like the lowly cockroach – filthy, repulsive and filled with the endurance to have kept it going for thousands of years. You catch one skittering by in your peripheral vision every once in a while. Smoosh a cockroach and there’s always another to take it place. Always. I grew up in one of …

Continue reading ‘from my sketchbook: racism is alive and well’ »