San Francisco, summer 1974 – a Vignette: I want to cross the street, stand on the corner of the intersection waiting until the only vehicle in sight passes: a public transit bus. Dressed in my hippie best of long jeans skirt, Biba-of-London top and sandaled feet, I feel the need to show off how amazingly … Continue reading Black & White, and all shades in between
Here’s a challenge for you traveling urban sketchers out there: Be brave, try drawing exquisite St. Peter’s Square in Rome! Don’t balk at the architecture though, which is so maddeningly complicated you may well break your pencil in half and reach for your camera instead. But don’t do that! Go on, fit everything you see … Continue reading Teachers & Influencers in Drawing #3: Franklin McMahon
Here’s a crazy guy. Look at these drawings! I wonder what he was like in person, was he as obsessive as his frantic drawing style suggests? His mile-a-minute brain in action, observation skills in fourth gear, his pencil never leaving the paper, one continuous line all over until the sheet is filled with lively figures, … Continue reading Teachers & Influencers in Drawing #2: Felix Topolski
I was not happy at Art School in the late ‘sixties. The obsession with then-current edge Abstract Expressionism did not interest me at all: I was already into drawing from ‘real life’ at that time and still am now. So I didn’t feel I belonged. I was never very good at facing a blank canvas, … Continue reading Teachers & Influencers in Drawing #1: Otto Dicke
Try to imagine: a ‘Bierstrasse’ restaurant as big as a football field in the midst of Harlem where you can get beer, sausage and kraut delivered to long wooden tables while Japanese jazz-organist Akiko Tsuruga plays with our very own Cory Weeds, of Cellar and Frankies’ fame, on saxophone! It’s all true. Cory never fails … Continue reading New York: Jazz with Cory Weeds
At an ‘oldies’ concert in the ‘eighties, I experienced the sound of the stratospheric falsetto voice of a male singer for the first time, live and in action. I had heard it before of course, having come into ‘musical awareness’ in the early ‘sixties, shortly before the Beatles came out. We had just entered high … Continue reading Men, singing window-shattering High Notes
Graphic novels and ‘comics’ storytelling represent a growing genre in publishing these days. It includes not only the familiar sci-fi and criminal strip cartoons with their extreme foreshortening of hands and feet and their Baaaam!!! Flash*!# Aargh!* constantly exploding balloons, but serious literature too, such as for example, Proust and Kafka by the Frenchmen Stéphane … Continue reading Joe Sacco: Visual journalist
Huh, Khartoum? Are you crazy? Don’t go there, it’s dangerous! Many people react this way when you tell them you’re going to Sudan. It’s the almost generic fear they harbor about places in Africa that don’t involve safari-holidays. Being a square peg in a round hole in many ways, I’d be the one to be … Continue reading Sudan #3: Pro-Democracy protests in Khartoum
In 1884 the Sudan was in turmoil. That’s not unusual you may say: it’s been in turmoil right up to today – and you’d be right. But the issue at that time was that a 50,000-strong army led by the up-and-coming charismatic Muslim Messianic leader Muhammad Ahmed (the ‘Mahdi,’ the chosen one) began to surround … Continue reading Sudan #2: A foot trek across the Bayuda desert
From age 18 to 29, I smoked Camels. Known to be strong – and thus ‘masculine!’ – cigarettes, with its package showing a camel in the desert and pyramids in the background, the smoking habit supported my ‘seventies self-presentation of a non-conformist, independent and tough broad. Helpful make-belief, when you travel solo in strange places. … Continue reading Sudan #1: About Camels
