My brothers and I have been cleaning out my parents’ house, but it is slow going. We would go one Saturday, work a few hours and leave, but then we wouldn’t return for another week or two because things came up. But we are almost down to the wire.
Last weekend, I finally got most of the things out of my old closet in my old room. After weeks of cleaning the room out I found one box that was a treasure trove of my life. It was the last thing left in the closet after I went through everything else. It was quite large, sitting at the back of the closet and it contained a hodgepodge of things. There were old newspapers – ones I saved with news stories I thought were interesting and school newspapers I had printed, when I handled that with my printing business.
But there were lots of newspapers and magazines that I saved because my cartoons were in them. I used to do cartoons for local publications when I was in high school and college. I had forgotten about that. Some of them are excellent. I also had a lot of comic strips I was working on as a kid, they are not bad either.
I threw out a lot of the excess newspapers that weren’t needed, but I’ll show you some of the cartoons I had published and the comic strips I was working on when I get a chance. I noticed that the newspapers I had saved were of tragedies, like the Miami Herald with stories of 9/11 and Hurricane Andrew – things I would rather forget. Those I dumped. I didn’t need to revisit those times.
I found awards in the box, and diplomas from high school and college and lots of boy scout stuff – awards, badges, things like that. I also found letters – letters and post cards that friends sent me so many years ago. And I found random photos of myself and my family and friends. And everything brought back memories. There were lots of old computer parts and old computer programs from the early days of PC’s.
I worked at a local newspaper at one point and I sold ads as well as working in production putting the paper together for print. I drew a lot of things for them back then – I drew political cartoons but also I did drawings for advertisements that ran in the paper. I can see I really put a lot of time into them.
I found a color aid pack which I used in college. I still don’t understand the point of it for my classes after all these years, but I remember I couldn’t find it at the time and I needed it. My father ended up finding it in downtown Miami somewhere. It was expensive I remember, and I think we used it once or twice in class to cut out colors for something. Literally I used one or two color swatches from the whole packet.
I remember in one art class we used magazines to cut out colors from the printed images and we recreated famous art from that, gluing the odd shaped pieces into art. I did a small image of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I’m hoping to find it as I clean out my old room, I’ve been looking for it all these years. I’d like to frame the little thing.
My recreation was only 3″ x 3″ and I remember seeing the original for the first time – it’s huge, it blew me away at the size after seeing the small piece I created so long ago. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon seems so large to me and my favorite, Starry Night is so small. Both at MOMA – worth the trip.
Anyway, I’ll show you some of the cartoons and things I found when I sort them out and hopefully some other things.
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