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Drawings

It can't all be about scrimshaw. Here's my life in drawings, from my earliest - a surfer and Ratfink.

I was 10 when I drew this surfer. I had just been given a blank book and I inscribed the first page. A lot of my early drawings were copies of Big Daddy Ed Roth's work I found in my brother's Hot Rod magazines.

Below, a self-portrait done when I was feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. I'm feeling better now...

The portrait below was drawn with one continuous line. The ship is drawn completely with stippled dots using an old-fashioned quill pen. This was led to my doing scrimshaw back in 1978. When I first started doing stippling I had never seen the technique. What happened is that after coming back from my first trip to Mexico in in 1972 I had hepatitis and was laid up in bed for a couple months. About all I could do was draw. I had chosen as my subject a small barnacle. I started by drawing with lines which became shorter and shorter until they turned into dots. And so began my lifelong obsession with dots. I guess I can thank Hepatitis A for that...

A couple more of those one-line drawings. The first led to me doing the second for Northfield Mandolin's logo.