Not completely root vegetable nor humanoid, here is the invesgitater of the abnormal, Joe Potato, deep in the ground where he makes a startling discovery….
On St. Patrick’s Day, 1879, the Irish-American Henry McCarty aka Henry Antrim aka William H. Bonney aka Kid Antrim aka Billy the Kid met secretly with Governor Lew Wallace (a famed Civil War general) of New Mexico to make a deal regarding his activities during the Lincoln County War. The Kid agreed to submit to token arrest and give testimony in exchange for amnesty. However, the district attorney refused to play along with the arrangement and the Kid slipped jail and resumed his outlaw ways. While governor, Wallace wrote the beloved novel “Ben Hur”. I drew this with Rapidograph, brush and ink and it is one of the series of T-shirts sold at the Billy the Kid Pageant.
A gentleman representing a groundswell of public opinion requested graphics of root vegetables. That is not a subject matter which I have assayed much in the past…but I found several tenuous examples. Here is a piece I did for the Chicago Tribune in 1979. If this looks familiar to followers of this blog, it may be because I based one of the cards in the OD deck from it a few years later.
I kind of like the spaghetti swirl of leaves in the foreground tree and am also partial to the big roundish stone or whatever which has dented the ground.
Yes, another lovely tree from Louisville. You know, I think that is the last time I set foot in Louisville, though I have driven through it since. When visiting my kids’ cousins there we always went to a certain barbeque joint, Mark’s Feed Store on Shelbyville Road, which wasn’t too bad even though I don’t much like barbeque. You got your drinks in a fruit jar, which I suppose was evoke the atmosphere of being in some down-home hayseed roadhouse, which it isn’t at all…being part of chain in a solid middle-class neighborhood.
The wonderful tree! The various species provide shade, homes for critter and human alike…timber for a trillion and one useful or beautiful objects…fruit and nuts, syrups, medicine and spirits…they clean the very air and bind the soil- and all they ask of us in return is carbon dioxide and manure. I salute the tree!
I believe these trees were sketched during a March ’03
visit to Louisville, KY. Our kids might rate it is the worst Spring Break excursion ever— judging by the state of the trees, Spring had not sprung and we dragged them to a bunch of colleges for tours prior to our son’s high school graduation.
It just happens that a sketch book has a number of tree drawings. I made this one with a very fine-line Sharpie while sojourning in the mountains of North Carolina with the Bellwood Boys.
Thus concludes this series of picture elements. Actually, there are more. What they were for shall never be known…unless Howie happens to see this and remembers!
Makes you want to squeal with delight, doesn’t it?