from my sketchbook: wilbur brink

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The race is on and it looks like heartaches and the winner loses all
On Memorial Day 1931, 24 year-old driver Billy Arnold was the defending champion of the Indianapolis 500. Having competed in the annual event two previous times, Billy won the 1930 race after leading all but first two laps, the most ever by a winner.

On lap 162 of the 1931 Indianapolis 500, leader Billy Arnold broke his rear axle as he negotiated the fourth turn. He lost control and his car tumbled over the wall. In the process, the car lost a wheel — which sailed over the fence and through the air  —  striking and killing eleven year-old Wilbur Brink, who was playing in his yard at 2316 Georgetown Road, across from the Speedway.

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IF: layer

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The new challenge word on the Illustration Friday website is “layer”.
layer? I hardly even know her.
Tyler Durden explains the art of making… um… soap :

“The clear layer is glycerin. You can mix glycerin back in when you make soap. Or You can skim the glycerin off. You can mix the glycerin with nitric acid to make nitroglycerin. You can mix nitroglycerin with sodium nitrate and sawdust to make dynamite. You can blow up bridges. You can mix nitroglycerin with more nitric acid and paraffin and make gelatin explosives. You can blow up a building, easy. With enough soap, you can blow up the whole world.”

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Monday Artday: redo a famous painting (part 1)

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The new Monday Artday challenge is to redo a famous painting. I did this for another illustration website a little over a year ago. My version of “Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière” by French Neoclassical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres can be seen here. For the current challenge I chose two paintings that are linked, but for a ridiculous reason.
make it BLUE! make it PINK!
Pinkie  by Thomas Lawrence, a delicate portrait of eleven-year old Sarah Barrett Moulton and Blue Boy  by Thomas Gainsborough, a portrait of a young man believed to be Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, were purchased by American railway pioneer Henry Edwards Huntington and displayed opposite each other in his private collection at, what is now, The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Since their chance pairing in the early 1920s, many gallery visitors have mistakenly attributed the two paintings to the same artist. In reality, Blue Boy  depicts a young man in period costume from one hundred and fifty years earlier and Pinkie  is a contemporary painting (for 1794) of a young girl dressed appropriately for the late eighteenth century. In addition, the paintings were completed twenty-five years apart. The actual identity of Blue Boy  remains a mystery, but years of research points to young Buttall as the most likely model. Pinkie  was commissioned by the grandmother of Sarah Barrett Moulton, aunt of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although young Sarah passed away just a year after the painting’s completion.

William Wilson, author of The Los Angeles Times Book of California Museums, calls them “the Romeo and Juliet of Rococo portraiture”.

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Monday Artday: horse with hands riding a bike

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This week’s Monday Artday challenge is an unusual (and specific) suggestion. It’s a “horse with hands riding a bike”.  Supposedly, horses are difficult to draw, hands are difficult to draw and bicycles are difficult to draw. So, putting them all together presents a particularly difficult challenge. And artists seem to always be looking for a challenge.
the sky started falling, a deafening rain/Prophets shout warnings but all is in vain/Paul Revere's nightmare comes true in our land/Nobody listens, I talk with my hands
Well, here is a horse and some hands and a bicycle — each with its own easy-to-follow dotted line for cutting.

Put ’em together yourself.

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from my sketchbook: stanley fafara and sue randall

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Gee, Dad, I have enough trouble keeping myself good without keeping all the other kids good.
Poor Beaver Cleaver. He was a pretty nice kid, if only he didn’t give in to the misguided persuasion of idiotic Larry Mondello and two-faced liar Gilbert Bates. The antics got Beaver into a certain amount of trouble, though he usually walked away with nothing worse than a torn pair of pants or some lost lunch money. After a stern talking to from Dad (or sometimes a sentence of no dessert and a couple of hours in his room), Beaver forgave his pals and moved on. Lucky for The Beav he never followed in the real-life footsteps of Stanley Fafara who portrayed classmate Whitey Whitney.

After the cancellation of Leave It to Beaver   in 1963, teenage Stanley began drinking and dabbling in drugs. By 22, he was dealing drugs regularly. In the early 1980s, Stanley was breaking into pharmacies until he was arrested. He served a year in jail for burglary and, upon his release, began dealing drugs again. In the 90s, he spiraled into heavier drug addiction, living on Portland, Oregon’s Skid Row and survivng on a small Social Security check. In 2003, during routine hernia surgery, Stanley lapsed into a coma due the the weakened state of his body from years of drug abuse. He was removed from life support and died on his 54th birthday.

Beaver was enamoured with his elementary school teacher, the pretty Miss Landers, played by Sue Randall. After a supporting role in the 1957 film The Desk Set  with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Sue focused on episodic television. She was regularly cast in a host of Westerns and dramas before landing her twenty-nine episode run in the later seasons of  Leave It to Beaver.  She continued in various guest spots through 1967 until she left Hollywood and returned to her native Philadelphia. Sue became very active in many charitable causes like the Multiple Sclerosis Telethon, Reading for the Blind and Project Headstart. Sue was a heavy smoker for most her life and a 1982 cancer diagnosis forced the removal of her larynx. Her health declined from the effects of lung cancer and Sue passed away at the age of 49. Her body was donated to the Humanity Gifts Registry at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Monday Artday: strange food

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The new illustration challenge on the Monday Artday website is “strange food”.
if it looks good, eat it
To break up the monotony between shots of sun-tanned tourists on cruise ships and Anthony Bourdain’s smoke-filled excursions to out-of-the-way gourmet eateries, the Travel Channel debuted Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern  in 2007. Andrew is a chef, a food critic and, most important, a daring gourmand. He’s a likable and entertaining guy and, for a time, I enjoyed watching the show.

The premise of the show is simple. Andrew travels to a specific country, meets some locals, gets them to cook up a batch of native specialties and Andrew eats ’em — no questions asked. And let me tell you, Andrew has eaten some pretty weird shit in the show’s five seasons. In early episodes of the show, Andrew happily scarfed down balut  (a fertilized duck egg with a duck embryo inside), a still-beating frog’s heart, fermented whale blubber, lamb’s tongue and eye, assorted insects and various internal and external parts of chickens that are usually dropped down a garbage disposal. As the seasons rolled on, a pattern seemed to develop. I became very aware of Andrew’s affinity for the reproductive organs of masculine members of the edible animal kingdom. It was very obvious that Andrew loved a good pair of cojones  at chow-time. On outings to local marketplaces, Andrew always questioned butchers about the availability of Rocky Mountain oysters  or, as they were called in the episode filmed in Spain – criadillas. Extended segments of subsequent shows featured a smiling and anxious Andrew stuffing bollocks  into his maw like movie popcorn. Happy waitresses or humble farmers would present platters overflowing with steamed and deep-fried delicacies — like calf’s brains or jellied moose nose — but Andrew, although grateful, would eye the kitchen, hopeful for a big bowl of balls. Soon, Bizarre Foods got boring.

The novelty of Bizarre Foods  eventually wore off and I started looking elsewhere for entertainment from my cable television provider. Frankly, if I wanted to watch a guy visit Taiwan and gobble testicles for an hour, I’d watch gay Asian porn.

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from my sketchbook: rachel roberts

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is that all there is?
Welsh actress Rachel Roberts appeared predominantly in British cinema, earning critical acclaim opposite Albert Finney in the 1960 British New Wave film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.  Her role in The Sporting Life, with Richard Harris, was recognized with an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Rachel was regularly cast as women of questionable character, as in the black comedy O Lucky Man.  Director Peter Weir cast her against type as a teacher in his mysterious Picnic at Hanging Rock. Through the 60s and 70s, Rachel acted in television movies and guest roles in several series, including two seasons as Tony Randall’s irreverent housekeeper in The Tony Randall Show.

Rachel married fellow actor Rex Harrison in 1962. The marriage lasted ten years and ended in divorce in 1971. Devastated over the divorce, Rachel became depressed and turned to alcohol. She moved to Hollywood in an effort to forget her time with Harrison. Her alcohol consumption grew, especially after an unsuccessful attempt to win back Harrison in early 1980. Overcome by insecurity and depression, Rachel overdosed on barbiturates on November 26, 1980. She ingested an unidentified caustic substance in addition to the drugs. The acidic reaction propelled her body through a decorative glass screen. She was found by her gardener, in a negligee on her kitchen floor – her body cut to ribbons among the shards of shattered glass. Rachel was 53.

In 1948, actress Carole Landis took her own life over an ill-fated affair with Rex Harrison. What was it about Rex Harrison that drove two women to suicide?

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