The Stone Boat, A Story

This drawing of a stone boat is an illustration for a very short story of mine related to the “Three Little Pigs.” The story however is about five mice. Here it is, in much abbreviated form.

Five mice named Jason, Rason, Dason, Clayson, and Mason live on a farm where they are in constant terror of the cat. They have a meeting and decide that if they build a house in the yard then they can play outside all they want and retire to the protection of their house if the cat should appear. Like the three little pigs they first build a house of straw. The cat appears and the mice hide in the house of straw. The cat sleeps all afternoon on the stoop, and goes into the house in the evening but the wind blows the house away and the mice realize their mistake. The mice then build a house of wood which also offers them protection all day from the cat, but collapses when the dogs tail thumps against it. Finally they build a secure and permanent house of bricks and mortar, and this turns out to be the perfect reliable refuge. Their success emboldens the mice to build a boat so they can go sailing on the lake nearby. They hold a meeting and the eldest mouse, Mason, declares, “Every thing good is made out of bricks and mortar, everything else is trash.” This kind of thinking is natural coming from a mouse with a name like Mason. The mice all take his advice and build an elaborate boat of bricks, only to see it sink in a very few minutes. The stone boat floated only long enough for its picture to be drawn. The mice swim to safety and proceed to build a boat of wood. Now a boat of wood should work in theory, but mice know very little about boat building technique, they neglected to caulk the seams and the wood boat sank even faster than the stone boat. Then, for a long tome, the mice were totally perplexed but the youngest mouse, sitting by the edge of the lake happened to see some straw and string float past and thought to himself, “Nothing can sink a straw!” So, reluctantly taking the advice of the youngest mouse, Rayson, The five mice built a boat of straw tied together with string. This boat is perfect, they use it all the time, and lately they have been loaning it to the cat when they aren't using it.

This drawing was done with a red wax pencil on thick watercolor paper which was prepared in a very curious way. I painted a thick coat of white gesso onto the paper and just before it was completely dry I pressed it up against some bricks to give it a kind of masonry texture, this gave me a little bit of a head start in drawing the bricks of the boat but if you look carefully you may see some particles of brick dust stuck in the paper surface.

Drawing, Nude Combing her Hair and Petting the Cat

This nude figure is sitting on the bed, combing her hair and petting the cat with her foot. You may want to ask me why I decided to put an electric plug and a wire in my drawing. Was I because I wanted it to symbolize the power and life of the figure? No. Was it because I got my figure too far over to the right, and I needed something to balance the composition? No. It was because I wanted to be absolutely sure that in the future no one would attempt to pass my drawing off as an old master drawing done in the Renaissance. That is why I put the plug in the drawing. To make sure that it is a “modern” drawing.

This concern with being modern for me goes back to my student days when I was in art school. I had several old master drawings up on my wall and my mother, coming to visit, started looking at a Leonardo drawing and asked me, “When did you do this one, Dicky?” This question I dismissed at the time as coming from someone who knew nothing of art history. But it was impossible to dismiss it completely. My work was anachronistic. And it is still a factor in my drawing. Does my figure’s right arm look suspiciously like the right arm of Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl? Sticking in a Tide box is not going to solve this problem.

The City, Cat Crossing the Street

This drawing is about a cat that is crossing the street at an intersection. Actually he appears to be stopped and just standing there undecided what to do, or where to go, like cats often do. That is what I think it is about. Someone else might say it is about the man in the second story window on the left that is reading the stock report in the paper. Someone else might say it is about the woman with a child on the right, getting ready to cross the road.

If you do a drawing of an entire city, then the drawing is about the city. If you insert the image of one person into the drawing of the city, then the drawing is about that person and the city becomes the backdrop. And if you draw a city, with figures in it, and then you put in a cat, then the drawing is about the cat. That’s what I think, and I’m sure that the cat agrees!

This drawing measures 11” x 7.5”. It was created using maroon crayon pencil , on a heavy cold press watercolor paper. The paper in this drawing was painted yellow before the drawing was started, and after the paint was dry the surface had a lot of paint chips pressed into it with a heavy roller. This can’t be seen in the scan and is hard to explain with words, but the paper of this drawing has a complex embossed surface while can only be seen close up, this texture gives the drawn line a nice lively unpredictability. It is signed on the lower right, witha B.