My biggest regret as a cartoonist and waster of art supplies is the fact that I am not the world’s best portrait artist. I can only rarely make a work of art look like a real person. Usually the subject has to to be a person I love or care deeply about. This 1983 picture of Ruben looks very like him to me, though he probably wouldn’t recognize himself here as the 8th grader who told me in the fall of 1981 that I was his favorite teacher. That admission on his part kept me from quitting and failing as a first year teacher overwhelmed by the challenges of a poor school district in deep South Texas.
My Great Grandma Hinckley was really great.
My great grandmother on my mother’s side passed away as the 1970’s came to an end. I tried to immortalize her with a work of art. I drew the sketch above to make a painting of her. All my relatives were amazed at the picture. They loved it immensely. I gave the painting to my Grandma Aldrich, her second eldest daughter. And it got put away in a closet at the farmhouse. It made my grandma too sad to look at every day. So the actual painting is still in a closet in Iowa.
There were, of course, numerous students that made my life a living heck, especially during my early years as a teacher. But I was one of those unusual teachers (possibly insane teachers) who learned to love the bad kids. Love/hate relationships tend to endure in your memory almost as long as the loving ones. I was always able to pull the good out of certain kids… at least in portraits of them.
When kids pose for pictures, they are not usually patient enough to sit for a portrait artist. I learned early on to work from photographs, though it has the disadvantage of being only two-dimensional. Sometimes you have to cartoonify the subject to get the real essence of the person you are capturing in artiness.
But I can’t get to the point of this essay without acknowledging the fact that any artist who tries to make a portrait, is not a camera. The artist has to put down on paper or canvas what he sees in his own head. That means the work of art is filtered through the artist’s goofy brain and is transformed by all his quirks and abnormalities. Therefore any work of art, including a portrait that looks like its subject, is really a picture of the artist himself. So, I guess I owe you some self portraits to compare.
Yeah, that’s me at 10… so what?
Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.
Catch a Falling Star 
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? (a review by the Uncritical Critic)
I love musicals. What can I say? I am a surrealist as an artist, and so I am dedicated to combining the disjointed and bizarre to make something that makes you laugh, or makes you cry, or makes you go, “Huh? I wonder why?” So when, in the middle of a sometimes serious but mostly comic story of escaped convicts on the lam in the Great Depression Era South, people suddenly burst into song… I love it!
And this movie is filled with creative stuff and biting social satire about religion, politics, crime and punishment, love and sex, desire and disappointment, and, most of all, the need to escape from it all if only for a moment to share a good, old-fashioned song.
The main character is Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney), so naturally the sirens overpower him and turn one of his crew into a frog. This is because this story is based on the Odyssey by Homer. Only the Trojan War is replaced by a chain gang singing spirituals as they break rocks, the cyclops is a Bible salesman and Ku Klux Klan member with a patch over one eye, and when Ulysses returns to Ithica, he defeats his wife’s suitors with a song. How can you not love a story as creative as that?
The whole movie is shot in color-corrected sepia tones to give it an old-photograph, old-timey feel. John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson are masterful in the role of McGill’s two idiot hayseed friends.
Again, I remind you, as a completely uncritical critic, I have no intention of trying to tell you what is wrong with this movie. I loved it. I will watch it again. I am writing this review only because I feel moved to tell you how much I loved it and why. So if you don’t approve of that, well, don’t shoot me. Put me on a chain gang and give me a chance to sing.
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