The Great Harrison Cady, Expert Animal Smithy!!

There are so many illustrators who I just love and imitate often. Sometimes as I'm looking through the book shops I see some I don't recognize, and that may have been overwritten by history.

A couple years ago I had this experience with the work of Harrison Cady and then after seeing his amazing illustrations that once, I have been running into them everywhere.









The stories of "Reddy Fox" are one of those free downloadable stories I ended up with on my phone and my son listens to them over and over. Then I realized that the handwork teacher at my school reads these books to her students while they work quietly.

I am just floored by this guys illustrations. Super balanced and full of form. This kind of confident, clean line work and quick hand that is so typical of newspaper illustrators of his time, similar in some ways to George Herriman or  Winsor McCay, and even Dr Seuss started working this way under the constraints of deadlines. It was a rich environment to bring up talented drawers in. I sometimes wish I could enforce that kind of pressure on myself to push myself.

 You can really see how a guy like this had learned from observing nature and field drawing, and then how well he crafts these perfectly proportioned and dimensional little characters is astounding. Each one is so readable and if you squint looks as perfectly balanced as a yin-yang.

Harrison Cady had a long association with Thornton Burgess, illustrating the writer's books, including Happy Jack, and his daily newspaper column, "Bedtime Stories". Their partnership spanned five decades, beginning with Baby Possum Has a Scare (c. 1912), The Adventures of Reddy Fox (1913) and Buster Bear Invites Old Mr. Toad to Dine (c. 1914), The series continued into the 1950s with At Paddy the Beaver's Pond (1950), followed by the reprint The Animal World of Thornton Burgess (1962).

Sketch Book Update. Becoming the old woman I have always been.

front stoop

 There was a  time when I was feeling like I had given up on art. When being a dad, or trying to have a teaching career had made the idea of sitting in the garage and painting for hours seem like the most ridiculous waste of time. I left the paint and the garage alone for most of two years I think. But when Audra came back from Bali after helping out with a Flora Bowley art adventure she bought a couple of canvases and made the whole family start painting again. A lot of thinks became clear to me when I began creating art again.

Firstly I recognized an emotional debt to the task of creating art. I saw that it had been there for me when I was a emotionally retarded high-schooler, drawing anorexic long necked nudists, and gangster rabbits and crap like that. It had gotten me to and through college and helped me make almost all of the important and lasting friendships I still count on now. Not to mention I use it to gain street cred with students and barflies alike.  So I felt for the first time that I owed art something.

I realized also that through art I am not only just enhancing my experience of awareness in the moment of drawing or painting observationally, but even just sketching from my imagination, or painting a sunken landscape full of prehistoric monsters, I am constantly seeking to understand the shapes and forms of the world as it is. My mind is always at work to make sense of space, distance, botanical structures, geology, anatomy, architecture, weather and atmosphere, shadow and light. Drawing and painting becomes a scientific task to recall how things fit together and appear to the eye. To use your sense of sight to recreate the images of your experience is a way of practicing your understanding. Each sketch, drawing and painting is a tiny thought experiment, in which you are literally measuring the dimensions of the world around you. There is no end to the insights that loom out of the fog of a blank page.

Sauvie Island

My Dog, french for werewolf.

And out of this rekindled desire to seek out artistic practice and strengthen my network of art friends I called up Greazy DC and we went to what I'm certain is not the most awkward life drawing session in the world, because I'm sure it gets weirder on a daily basis somewhere, but the most awkward pony themed life drawing session I have ever walked out on.

But we didn't give up and the next weekend we hunted down the Urban Sketchers at Palio on Ladd's Circle and I saw what could be possible with just a small watercolor set, a sketchbook and a Saturday morning. It was mostly a crew of lovely ladies and I felt for the first time in a while that I had found people who could teach me something valuable, without the ludicrous tuition costs I had come to expect, because Urban Sketchers is totally free (monetarily and otherwise).

Of course I am failing to express my point here, but what I am really trying to say is Thanks, to everyone who ever hung out and drew. I have a worthwhile task I can grow old with, and friends to join me in the task.

Stretch of river bank across from Oaks Park.

One of the least interesting views of the back fence and the woman who came to do the census at our house for five hours.

Road Trip Jet Jets. Littering...Lettering....Letting go.

A town called Beaver. It will grow up to be stronger for the name.

Salt Lake City...goes on forever.

 While Audra drives I get to paint some little Jet Jets to deliver to the stops along the way. It has gotten to the point where any time we go on any kind of road trip I'm packing my little art set first and putting hanging wires on some scrap wood...then packing my clothes.

Before I started posting them here I had put up maybe a hundred around town over the years. Now it is more of a traveling exhibit. I get the feeling like many of them must just get disposed of lickitty split, but hold out hope that somewhere someone like me is finding these little guys and taking them into their life somehow, maybe to adorn the walls of their bathroom. (Where most wierd little artends up, lets be honest.)  It has lately felt like the kind of project that will take years and years before I really know if it is working, or what working is for that matter. Is it reverse shoplifting, or artful littering? I don't know.

Downtown Boise

Boise Idaho right outside the Fork.

I just wanna paint water colors! Joy and Pain...pump pump it up!!!

water color painting in Zion!!!

 It always seems like it will be this great peaceful time, to sit in the sun and paint some beautiful scenery, and then I am sitting there swearing at the changing shadows and how the paint looks all weak and I realize I am just not the kind of person who creates peacefully. It is an awful and frustrating act to look into the eyes of the world and know you may never really know whats going on in there. It is joyful, don't get me wrong. It is a good way to spend the afternoon while vacationing in some of the most beautiful country in the world but painting what you see is hard work. It is a chance to reassure yourself that no matter how hard you look you will never see it all and there is no way you will recreate all the amazingness you have been gifted with seeing in this life.  And then I spilled ink all over it anyway so who cares.

Jet Jet Downtown and in a cave, also more jungle cats.

Dropped off two more of my buddies downtown the other day. One in the Pearl and the other one...I can't remember where. Oh well the point is to let them go so does it matter if I forget were they have gone to? I do wonder if they ever end up finding new homes.

Sometimes I forget where I leave them and sometimes i forget to take pictures of them, like happened last month when I had gone hiking with the family at the falls in the gorge. I had crawled into this cave set on leaving the painting in there somewhere. I was using my phones flash to see my way and the tiny cave just kept going on and on for fifty feet or more into the darkness. I finally reached the back wall and crawling on my hands and knees in the tiny space I was suddenly curious about the ceiling and took a picture upwards to illuminate the situation. in the momentary light I saw hundreds of spiders crawling all over the walls above me. I threw the painting down and scrambled out on my hands and knees whimpering and squealing, then emerged to the dubious looks of my wife and kids, who watched as I did a horrible little bug dance.

Round six or whatever of jungle cat drawings with Aunstin B. Amur Tiger time.

The usual kind of treasures. Altered signs and randoms and a train.

New York Street Art!!! Nov 2013

 I tried to grab some shots from our trip to the east coast. Mostly in the city, along the highline. Some weird little details and signage. One of this awesome old mural with the "Bode wizard  guy", from Brooklyn right by this little coffee shop called Lincoln Station, and the last shot is from a copy of spray can art that I found in this book shop under the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Black Butte Jet Jet and sketch book update. Some things I forgot to post this summer.