These were drawn in a teeny weeny (3″x5″) spiral sketchbook with a regular ballpoint pen in 1995-1996. Some were drawn in airport waiting areas, others in church. others who knows where. These micro sketchbooks are great for traveling because they fit in even the smallest pocket.
© 2024 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Back in June I posted drawings I had done in my bible in 1997-1998. Those were drawings that had thought bubbles that the people might have been thinking. Here are drawings from the same bible and same time period but these have no or few words beyond what is on the page. In most cases these were people sitting in pews listening to the sermon or choir. Sometimes I was creating a message behind the drawing in my head but other times I was just drawing a face I found interesting.
© 2024 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
In the last post I told about having to commute by bus to my job in Downtown San Jose, California from the suburbs. The job was at Eulipia Restaurant and I chose to apply there because I liked their ad in the newspaper. It was cool and hip and it made me want to be there. I had plenty of restaurant experience at that point and got a job as a waiter. I later became head waiter and manager. This job was going to carry me over until I got a more permanent job or get back into Graduate School. Little did I know I wouldn’t leave Eulipia for 13 years.
What ended up happening was I got into San Jose State University as a graduate student working towards my MFA. I kept the job through graduation. Then I started applying for teaching positions at the college level. I quickly landed a part-time instructor position but a full-time gig eluded me year after year so I always kept my job at Eulipia even as I was working teaching at three different community colleges nearby. Before you know it 13 years had passed. In 1993 I retrained myself to be a computer artist and landed an animator job in Tulsa, Oklahoma and moved away the next year.
Those years at Eulipia were truly wonderful years. I loved the work and the people. I did a lot of drawings of my co-workers both in my sketchbook and larger pieces in charcoal and Prismacolor pencils that got up to 6′ x 4′. I also did extensive photography of many co-workers and made contacts with many customers that led to many photography commissions and projects. I will show those in a later post.
Here are some of the sketchbook drawings from that era, 1981-1994.
Back in 1981/82 my first wife, Kathy, and I were living with her parents in San Jose, California. We had returned to the Bay Area after my failed graduate school effort at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. That’s a story for another time but the result was we returned home with no money and no jobs so living with her parents was really the only option. Once we were there I quickly landed a job at a restaurant in downtown San Jose called Eulipia. To get there from their suburban home I took the bus every day. The first nine are from that year of bus travel.
Drawing on a moving vehicle of any kind is a challenge. You have to let go of precision. It forces you to let your physical action in the world be part of your image of the world. It’s an incredible teaching tool in developing both style and ability. If I was teaching drawing now I would make that an essential assignment.
Fast forward 21 years to 2003 and I am in Europe with my daughters on vacation. We travel by train, bus, car and subway and I draw while on them all. The final three are from that trip to give you an idea of how my style and ability changed and progressed over those 2 decades. While they were drawn live I worked on them quite a bit afterwards so they are much more polished than the earlier drawings.
In 2000 my divorce from my first wife, Kathy, was final. In 2003 I started dating Linda. In between I dated. Recently I scanned my sketchbooks from 2000 to 2003 and found these drawings of women I dated (or met in anticipation of maybe dating) during that time. Almost, but not all, of these were the result of online dating. Many people tell horror stories of online dating but with few exceptions my experience was overwhelmingly positive. None of them turned out to be who I was fated to marry but the women I met were smart, kind, sensitive, aware, interesting, attractive and wonderful. I learned a lot from that time and those relationships, even if it was just one date in some cases, and going through that made me confident when I finally found Linda, that she was the right one for me!