We have a Cagle Cartoons convention of sorts, every year in France, and I’m leaving for our get-together tomorrow, just as the impeachment news is coming hot and heavy every day. This happened during the last election when the Access Hollywood tape came out when I was stuck, with a bunch of CagleCartoonists, away from our drawing boards as big news came calling. ARRGH!
So, before I leave, here are two impeachment ruckus cartoons. The first is about the Republicans who seem to have little to say about Trump’s Ukraine phone call and the Whistleblower report.
…and when the Republicans are talking, it doesn’t seem that they have been paying much attention.
I thought it would be fun to draw a couple of “reaction” cartoons. They don’t really make an argument, but they point out an interesting reaction. I imagine that Vladimir Putin is having a wonderful time watching the news these days. Here he is …
I regret that I had to put a label on his pants. Labels are for sissy editorial cartoonists who don’t trust their own caricatures to be recognizable – and today I’m a sissy. I had a hard time drawing Putin with a big, happy mouth – that just isn’t something that he does. He’s a dour character, and a big happy mouth makes Putin not look like Putin. I actually struggled with this. The solution? I did my best, and put a label on his pants. Sorry. That said, I think putting the label on his butt is a little funny.
Sorry, but the blog won’t be updating much the next couple of weeks while I’m away. Hold your breath and I’ll be back soon!
I know exactly where I was standing when I heard that President Roosevelt had died. I was standing on our sun porch. I was also on that same sun porch when Babe Ruth died. When I heard that World War 2 had ended, I was just about to jump into my red cart on the top of the Campbell St. hill and take a fast ride down. People burst from the houses shouting and crying out the news! When President Kennedy was shot, I was standing next to Barney Thompson’s drawing board at The Famous Artists Schools talking to him when someone burst in to tell us the news. One of the other cartoonists said, “Good!” I was working on a Playboy illustration in my studio when I heard that Bobby Kennedy was shot. We tend to remember where we were when these important events took place.
I was sitting on the front steps of Ottello Breda’s house with 2 or 3 friends when we saw the first issue of Mad Comics in 1952. We were stunned. A comic book in black and white that made fun of EVERYTHING!
Ottello was one of my best friends and when we were younger in the primary school years, he was the only other kid I knew that was a member of Captain Midnight’s Secret Squadron and possesseda secret decoder badge (free with several labels from Ovaltine) by which one could get clues as to what was going to happen in the next day’s radio adventure of Captain Midnight who came on at 5:15. “The Shark will cause trouble for Captain Midnight!”
I had millions of comic books like every other kid and we could always be found on somebody’s front porch steps reading, trading and discussing them. My very favorites were, “Captain Marvel Jr.” (I was lucky enough in later years to work with and learn from the artist of that book, Barney (Bud) Thompson), “Little Lulu” and “Hawkman” (I thought he had the coolest costume of all the super heros). Another was “The Boy Commandos”. God, I loved the Boy Commandos. They were 4 kids from the U.S., England , France and Holland who, with the help of their leader a grownup named Captain Rip Carter,fought the Nazis. My favorite kid was the one from the U.S. named “Brooklyn”. He wore a red derby and carried a machine gun. They were all orphans and they were tough. The only thing that always bothered me about them was that the French kid, Andre, was always saying “Oy oy!” It was many years before I realized that what he was saying was the French word “Oui”.
But, of course, there were hundreds of other comics and I devoured them all despite my father’s warnings that they would rot my brain. When I went off to art school, he cleaned out my precious collection. In those days we were all under the scornful eyes of our disapproving parents but we continued on with our sinful pursuit.
One of my favorite comic book trading friends was Brian. We walked to school each morning together. All we talked about was comic books. We lived in a comic book world of our own so it wasn’t hard for me to convince Brian that The Green Canary was, indeed, a real superhero who walked among us. Over a period of time, I had created this fictional character who, I insisted, really existed in our town of New Bedford. I knew people who had seen him, I told Brian. He was skeptical, of course, so it behooved me to go further in my deception. I started to leave little notes to Brian and myself on the path we took to school. It was my habit to walk across the Common to his house in the morning and then we’d go back a block or two to the Common and walk up to our school which was at the top. I would place the notes off to the side of the path we took and then zip down to Brian’s house to pick him up. As we’d walk along, I would suddenly spy something off near a bush.
“Hey, Brian, looks like a little piece of paper over there with some writing on it!”
Young Randy in knickers.
We’d rush over and read the latest note from The Green Canary. Brian was so caught up in this fantasy world of super heros that he actually was buying my little trickery. I, of course, was starting to actually believe that I was, indeed, a super hero named The Green Canary. Why I came up with that absurd name for a champion of justice, I’ll never know. We always had canaries in the house when I was a kid so that was probably the problem right there. It reached a point that I started to create a costume for myself from handy items in my wardrobe with the help of a towel cape and other stuff.. I also had a black (or was it green?) mask (Lone Ranger style). I had boots. I fashioned some sort of hood for my head, etc.. I was dying to make an appearance to Brian to clinch the deception I had engineered, so one day, the note on the path was an invitation for us to actually SEE the Green Canary. A date was written there along with a time and a place for us to be when the hero would make his appearance. Coincidentally enough, the “viewing” was to be at the corner of Campbell St. and Smith St. where my house was. Brian and I were to be there at 2 in the afternoon and we were to look down the street one block to Pleasant St. where the Canary was to appear.
The day arrived and so did 2 o’clock which found me suitably attired in my patchwork quilt of a costume and waiting for my gullible friend. THERE HE WAS! He peered down at me in disbelief. I struck the best super hero pose I could come up with and waved my hand in a comradely gesture and then… dove off where he couldn’t see me and quickly tore off my costume and ran around a back way to the corner where Brian stood. I apologized for being late and asked if he had indeed seen the Canary. HE HAD! And I had missed the chance of a lifetime.
Well, that was long long ago. It was back when you had to wait an hour after eating a tuna fish sandwich before you could go swimming at the beach.It was a time when all else would vanish and you could get swept up and lost in the intoxicating world of flying heroes and evil, fantastic villains. Goodness and bravery always won. A time when Joe Palooka and Superman took time out of their busy schedule to do combat with Hitler himself. Where a force so evil would sometimes take the combined effort of super heros from different comic books that would come together to make this world a better place. A heady, hypnotizing world where you shut out the real world as you turned the pages of a 10 cent comic book and could just faintly… ever so faintly, hear your mom and pop shouting “You’ll rot your brain”.
SO, if, by any chance, you happen to be out there, Brian, and you just happen somehow to be reading this story, I feel… I guess that I can now finally reveal that I…was…………The Green Canary!
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I am of Azorean Portuguese heritage. Both sides of my family came from the same island in the small group of islands called the Azores which lie 800 miles off the coast of Portugal in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. My mother’s side of the family came from one side of the island (which is the largest island of the nine) and my father’s side of the family came from the other side. My father came to this country when he was 10 years old in 1910. My mother was born in New Bedford (a final destination for many Azoreans).
The Azores are the tips of volcanoes that are sticking up in the ocean. My father was born in a little village called Sete Cidades (7 cities) which sits in a green valley in the crater of a volcano which last erupted in the 1700’s. No one knows why they called it 7 cities.
My mother’s mother, my Grandma Sarah or Serafina, was sent for by an American- Portuguese man who fell in love with her photo in the home of his neighbor who was a relative of hers. He paid her way to come to this country so he could marry her. But, he made a deal that if she got here and he decided not to marry her, they would pay him back. She left her job wrapping cigars in the old country and came to America where he married her. She was 13 yrs. old. She had 4 children of which my mother was the youngest. Her husband, my grandfather, died just before I was born, so my Grandma came to live with us. She was illiterate (like our president) until she died at 86. She never learned to read or write. She didn’t even know when her birthday was. She cooked and baby-sat my sister and I so my parents could both work.
Our flight was full of Portuguese/Americans who go every year to visit relatives. My wife, Leann and I were the only people on the flight that couldn’t speak Portuguese. They didn’t even translate the in-flight instructions in English because they assumed that everyone knew Portuguese. I spoke it when I was little but lost it later on retaining the ability to understand it when I heard it spoken… but I eventually lost that too because I spent years away from any Portuguese speaking people. I listened to a lot of tapes to bone up on the language before our trip and so much came back to me and I really impressed Leann when we got over there.
My Father’s Village
We stayed on Sao Miguel (St. Michael) which is where my family is from and is the largest of the nine islands. We took a room at a horse farm (Where else? We own a horse farm here in Connecticut) where the new Swedish owners gave lessons and riding excursions to their clients, a lot of whom were German tourists. Back in 2001, it had been owned by Portuguese, who I had talked to on the phone. We saw them, they owned another horse facility at the time we were there.
We visited three of the nine islands in our stay. My father had never told me how beautiful it was there. I’ve been to many countries in Europe and I have never seen anything as beautiful as the Azores. I would urge anyone reading this to NOT go there because the less tourists, the better. That’s one thing I liked about it. I saw practically no tourists except a few from mainland Portugal. The air is pure and sweet smelling, the islands are famous for the flora and their pineapples were the most amazingly sweet and often were included in meals. Even though the Azores is about latitudinally opposite New York, it is tropical in climate and is often spoken of in relation to Hawaii. You can quickly drive up to high points on the volcanic slopes and look out across the vast Atlantic. Breathtaking!
We were on a tiny dot of an island in the middle of the huge Atlantic Ocean, far from home… and yet… I was in a restaurant when a woman, who found out that I was an illustrator came up to me and asked if I knew Murray Tinkelman. Murray used to love that story.
Maria Has Gone into Ribeiras With All Five of the Newborn Lambs”. In this picture there is no Maria or lambs
When I came home, I decided to chronicle my trip with a suite of fairly large linocuts. I called it The Portuguese Prints and I put up a show of them at the Society of Illustrators in New York. I did a couple of things that were different for me with them. I wanted to be as spontaneous as possible and to reflect the feelings I had about the islands and to reflect the very texture of the place. Here’s what I did:
I “drew” my pictures on the blocks of linoleum free-hand with the lino cutter. In other words, I didn’t pencil it on the block first or even make any sketches whatsoever. I just dove in with the cutting gouge. It’s scary to work that way but I wanted a “primitive”, visceral look. As it was, my hand was too smart and they didn’t come out as primitive looking as I had hoped. Another thing I tried was to make several prints of each block.. some light and grayish ranging all the way to really black prints. I used color only a little in a couple of the eventual 11 pieces. I made a collage for the finished pieces, in each case, so that, in every picture, there are different tones of gray and black areas. I also let the block print in a grainy, textural way, in many cases to simulate the feeling I got from the lava rock and sand on the islands. I always print my pieces by hand so they don’t look as slick and “perfect” as they would if I used a press.
I like the peculiar title I used for one of the prints… ” Maria Has Gone into Ribeiras With All Five of the Newborn Lambs”. In this picture there is no Maria or lambs. It’s a code phrase used by Portuguese whalemen crews to confound their rival whalemen. On one of the islands, I saw a film in a little whaling museum which showed how the island, in the old days, would have lookouts perched in high stations who would look through binoculars all day hoping to sight whales. When they did, they would send a message by radio to their crew members who would be scattered about at their various jobs, farmer, barber, shopkeeper etc.. The message told them where the whales were spotted, how many there were and which direction they were heading. They would then rush to their boats before rival teams on the island would beat them to it. If Maria was going to Ribeiros it meant that the whales were heading west because that’s the direction Maria would have to go to get to Ribeiros. The one thing that I’ve never been able to figure out is that how they knew which Maria was meant. Half the women on these islands were named Maria. This picture was done in a comic-strip format.
Dog of Sao Miguel
The “Dog of Sao Miguel” was the first picture I made. I would see these Pit Bull-looking dogs all over this island. I asked what breed of dog they were. The answer was always, “It’s the dog of Sao Miguel”. It seems that each island has its own dog breed. They don’t live in the farmers’ houses. They just guard and tend the black and white spotted cows that are EVERYWHERE in the fields grazing. Their ears and tails are cropped so the cows can’t get a hold of them and they seem to subsist on just a little Portuguese bread that’s tossed to them. They are kept hungry and mean. You can see how ferocious my dog looks in this picture. At the horse farm where we were staying, though, there was a very tame one… probably the only tame one on the island. He was scary-looking though and he would park himself in the middle of the driveway.
When we first arrived on Sao Miguel, we got into our rented car and drove out of the airport and immediately to our right was a hill and on the very tip top of the hill stood a horse. Go figure. We had just left our horse farm and the first sight we see in the old country is a horse. And there aren’t a whole lot of horses on the islands. I’ve included this picture here along with some others that I shot just as they hang in a hallway in my home.
So, remember, if you want to plan a trip to an amazingly gorgeous paradise, do not, under any circumstances, consider the Azores… is the advice I always give.
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The news today is dominated by the Ukraine extortion story. here’s my cartoon …
Yes, I know, Ukraine doesn’t look like this lady. She shouldn’t have blond hair. She shouldn’t be fat. OK. OK. I visited Kiev and I saw this in a gift shop …
And I found her Ukrainian folksy dress on the Web. We go with the chichés we have, not the clichés we want or wish to have, as Donald Rumsfeld would say.
Here are some of my recent favorites on the Whistleblower scandal. This one is by Dave Whamond …
This is a word/drawing that Dong Kingman did for me on one of the opening pages of his book.
At The Famous Artists Schools, the correspondence art school I worked at between 1956 and 1964, the instructors all had their own little office or studio usually with a window to the outside. There were a few inner offices because there wasn’t quite enough room around the perimeter. Five courses… cartooning, painting, illustration, photography, and writing were offered. The writers and photographers were in buildings across the street and the artists were in the main building. As time went on, as I’ve mentioned in previous stories, the cartoonists decided that our little group should be all together in one room or “bull pen.” But in the beginning, we all had separate offices along with the others. Outside of each office was a nice nameplate with the artist’s name. They were dark gray with white embossed letters. One of the painters was a very friendly Ukrainian fellow named ZENOWIJ ONYSHKEWYCH, who we called Jack. One day when Jack went out to lunch, someone decided that we should have a little fun with his name plate and carefully painted an “I”, neatly and perfectly in the space between his first name and his last name. So, the name plate then read “ZENOWIJIONYSHKEWYCH”. It took weeks before it was noticed probably by one of the “tour guides”.
In the summer, a lot of our students would visit the school as part of their vacation trip. They would get to meet Al Dorne, our founder and also instructors that they had had, and in some cases, go out to lunch with us. There were girls that were hired just to show people through the building.
One day I arrived at work to find a couple seated in our foyer waiting for a tour guide. The husband had a wide brimmed straw hat on and bib overalls. The wife was diminutive, pale and looked VERY young. The outstanding thing about them was that the husband was holding a double-barreled shotgun. When Dorne was informed that we had an armed visitor waiting out at the receptionist’s desk, he was more than a little unnerved and shaken and pretty sure that someone had come to kill him. It turned out that it was just a harmless hillbilly who never went anywhere without his rifle. But, that didn’t prevent Dorne from hiring a new man to his staff, later, whose job no one could figure out because he just sat outside Dorne’s office all day at a desk doing nothing. He had a suspicious-looking bulge in his jacket.
When it was really hot in the summer, we were often sent home because there wasn’t any air conditioning at that point in time. But if it was hot, and still fairly bearable we had to, of course, stay at work which prompted several of the painters (they were the troublemakers) to disrobe and stand at their easels and drawing boards in their underwear. So, when visitors would arrive, our receptionist would ring a bell upstairs to alert the nudists to get some clothes on. This also allowed one of our painters (a vain fellow) to don his sun glasses because he thought he looked superbly handsome standing at his easel looking like a movie star.
This is a detail of a Kingman watercolor.
Each of the courses had 12 famous artists, writers or photographers as their “Guiding Faculty. They didn’t actually work there. They owned stock in the company, contributed to the teaching texts and visited the school periodically to lecture to us and observe some of our student critiques. BUT, one of the Guiding Faculty members had an unusual arrangement with the school in that he had to actually put in some time doing student critiques … not full time but a few days a week. I have no idea why, but that was the case. The faculty member was the famous Chinese watercolor painter Dong Kingman. He was a great guy. I liked him a lot. I used to watch him writing letters to his family in China, fascinated by the Chinese characters he would be composing. He only did visual corrections on the students’ work. He wouldn’t do the written critique that the rest of us had to do along with our visuals. Another instructor named Leonard Besser dictated the verbal stuff into the Dictaphone. He’d say things like, “Here you see that Mr. Kingman has shown you how to improve the color on that barn of yours…”
I used to aid Dong by running the slide machine while he lectured to The Westport Women’s Club and others. When the lecture was over and they tried to quiz him on certain aspects of his work, he would feign ignorance of English sometimes to get out of answering absurd questions … “I no unnerstan’ question…”
One time he decided to treat the entire faculty of the school to an authentic Chinese dinner at Westport’s downtown Chinese restaurant. He ordered special stuff from New York instead of their regular menu. The “Birds’ Nest Soup” was absolutely delicious.
On my first day of work in 1956 at the school, they didn’t have an open office for me so they put me in Dong’s office because he was away on a speaking tour. I, of course didn’t know him then and had never met him but there I sat in a little cubicle (it was one of those inner offices, not on the perimeter) with my back to the door sitting at his drawing board. A tour came through and the tour guide girl stopped outside Dong’s office and started explaining to the visitors that this was “Dong Kingman the famous Chinese watercolorist!” She hadn’t been apprised of the new tenant … me! So, there I sat frozen, afraid to move, afraid to turn my head at all lest they see that I was not of the Asian persuasion.
A few days later, Mr. Kingman arrived. As I sat there working away, suddenly behind me, a small Chinese man bustled in with portfolios and papers under his arms and without acknowledging me at all began putting stuff down in a flurry. I quickly gathered up my belongings and backed out of there post haste. My time as a famous Chinese watercolorist had ended.
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President Trump abruptly cancelled a planned meeting for peace talks at Camp David with the Taliban and the president of Afghanistan. Here’s my cartoon …
Here are some of my other favorites about the Taliban. This one is by Steve Sack …
Afghanistan would seem like it should be a big issue, but judging by the news coverage, and the number of editorial cartoons drawn on the subject, it is not. I had to go back in time quite a ways to find my favorites. This one is by RJ Matson …
Here’s my cartoon on National Security Advisor, John Bolton, getting the boot …
Here’s one of my favorite Bolton oldies, from 2005, when his hair was darker, his face wasn’t so shriveled, and he was Ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush …
Here are some of my recent favorites about about Bolton getting fired. This one is by Rick McKee …
My mother was a “winder”. She worked for the Acushnet Process Company, makers of the Titleist golf balls and their siblings, Green Ray and Bedford. All day long, seven hours a day she worked a bank of winding machines in a long, high-ceilinged loft room along with many many other women tending their own banks of winding machines.
She would place the “center” or core of a soon-to-be golf ball on a pronged apparatus and then take the end of elastic from a big spool attached to the machine, and wrap it around the ball once and set the machine to spinning and wrapping the elastic quickly around the ball at which time she would move to the next of seven machines and repeat the process and then move to the next and so forth. All this was done very quickly. When she was finished at the seventh machine, the firstwould be finished wrapping the ball to the appropriate thickness and she would snap off the elastic and tie it off, knock the wrapped ball off into a container and place a new center on the prongs and attach the elastic to it and then move on to the second machine and repeat the process. All day long with a short lunch break.
Once in a great while, a fully- wound ball would escape her hand before she could tie off the elastic and it would fall to the floor spinning out the tightly wound elastic and go bouncing down the loft making a high-pitched buzzing noise.
Sometimes I would accompany my dad as he drove mom to work in the morning and I’d watch her wrapping certain partsof her “elastic-snapping” fingers with tape to ward off the cuts the elastic would otherwise inflict.
If you worked at the Acushnet Process Company, you could get jobs there for your children, if need be, so when the time came for me to make some money to go to art school, I got a nice cushy job in the lab of the factory that summer.
My job involved many interesting tasks. One of the most peculiar was checking the viscosity of the glue that is used to secure the little patch covering the holethat is formed when a liquid is inserted into the liquid center of a golf ball. For those of you who do not know, the best balls have liquid centers. Less expensive balls have solid centers. A small hollow rubber ball is stuck on a spigot that fills it with the fluid. Okay … now I’m going to tell you what the secret ingredient is in the liquid center Titleist golf ball (or, at least what it was in 1954). Y’know, that liquid that you and Jean Shepherd thought was poison! You’re not going to believe this. Are you sitting down? KARO MAPLE SYRUP! That’s right, Karo Maple Syrup, a diluted version of it. So, I had to go each day to the room where the syrup was injected and then patched. There was a huge vat of the glue. I’d put a floating thermometer-type thing in it and then add water until the thermometer told me that it was the proper viscosity.
In that same room was a woman whose job was to make sure that none of the little rubber balls got distorted after their bout with the needle, syrup and glued- on patch. I used to stand and discuss TV shows with her while she performed her task which was to grab a handful of balls with her left hand and bounce them one at a time onto a metal table top and flip the good bouncers off into the “good” basket, while adroitly batting the bad bouncers off into the “bad” basket with her right hand. This was all performed with lightning speed.
Other tasks I had were to take a dozen balls and walk them through production where we would have them painted with Sherwin-Williams paint instead of the usual Glidden #80, for instance. Each day, I would take the balls from room to room through the process. Golf Balls are given 3 or 4 coats of paint so I would let them dry overnight and then move them on to the next spraying. When finished they would be put in our “library” for future checking to see the “yellowing” process. We would also experiment with different rubber mixtures on the covers of the balls.
I would also sometimes take a dozen balls out of production down to a special room where they had these big hanging leather blankets and I’d swat the balls 10 times each so they could be tested for damage. Employees who played golf were also given several balls each weekend to take out and play 18 holes with so they could test them afterwards. The employees would get free balls each weekend. HEY, those Titleists cost $2.00 a piece. Pretty expensive back in “54. We also would take balls out into a big field behind the factory where a machine would swat our balls and those of competitors to make sure ours was always leading the field. I would be out there recording the distance each ball would attain. I also went around the whole factory each day and took readings off various meters. It was pretty interesting work … never boring, and I got to move around the factory each day instead of staying at one locale like my poor mother. Did you know that the balls are x-rayed 3 times, at various stages of production to ensure that the centers are not distorted, before they leave the factory?
Okay, here’s the unusual art job I was given.
After my first year in art school, I again worked at the factory through the summer vacation. The famous singer Bing Crosby had ordered several boxes of special balls. He wanted them painted with a blue stripe. Since I was now an “artist” in their eyes, I was given the job of deciding on just the right shade of blue for the stripe. I was relieved of my normal duties for a couple of days while I, watercolor brush in hand, painted stripes of various hues of blue that I would mix. Light blues, dark blues, put a little more black into it… put a little more white into it etc.. I was given an unlimited amount of fresh balls to work on. It was crazy. When I finally hit on, what I thought, was the appropriate shade of blue, they mixed the paint to match my sample, painted the balls ordered, and off they went to the golfing crooner.
When I was a young kid, I spent many, many summers out on the links lugging the heavy golf bags of doctors and lawyers at the country club in New Bedford. Then I spent the two summers working at the golf ball factory. Then I became an illustrator and worked many years for Golf Digest doing big double-page spreads and covers. I know all about golf balls. I’ve seen them with their coats off. I’ve seen them take their acid baths and go through the X-ray machines. I know all about the clubs and golf bags and fairways and sand traps and pins because I drew them a million times … BUT … are you ready for this? Are you sitting down?
I HAVE NEVER EVER PLAYED GOLF. Not once!
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President Trump seemed to be sure that Hurricane Dorian was headed to Alabama –so sure that he reportedly altered a weather map with a Sharpie pen to change the projected path of the storm, causing a media storm. Here’s my cartoon.
I was thinking of doing a graduated tonal background. I thought about making the line look like it was on the plane of the ground by messing around in Photoshop, and finally I thought –the messy, hand-drawn line with no background is funnier.
Cartoonists have a special relationship with Sharpie markers, and we have a flood of Trump/Sharpie cartoons blowing in! Here are my favorites! This one is by Taylor Jones …
This one by John Cole may have a little sexual innuendo going on.
One could argue that Pinocchio gives full employment to editorial cartoonists – if editorial cartoonists had full employment. This one is by Kevin Siers.
Britains new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson is a terror for Britain but a delight for cartoonists! With a wild week in parliament, the cartoonists are having a great time with Boris. Here’s my cartoon …
Here are some recent favorites from our other cartoonists. This is a great one by Canadian Dave Whamond.
This one is by Kap, our cartoonist from Barcelona, who draw the Palace of Westminster as easily as Boris flattens it.
I am of Azorean Portuguese heritage. Both sides of my family came from the same island in the small group of islands called the Azores which lie 800 miles off the coast of Portugal in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. My mother’s side of the family came from one side of the island (which is the largest island of the nine) and my father’s side of the family came from the other side. My father came to this country when he was 10 years old in 1910. My mother was born in New Bedford (a final destination for many Azoreans).
We stayed on Sao Miguel (St. Michael) which is where my family is from and is the largest of the nine islands. We took a room at a horse farm (Where else? We own a horse farm here in Connecticut) where the new Swedish owners gave lessons and riding excursions to their clients, a lot of whom were German tourists. Back in 2001, it had been owned by Portuguese, who I had talked to on the phone. We saw them, they owned another horse facility at the time we were there.
I “drew” my pictures on the blocks of linoleum free-hand with the lino cutter. In other words, I didn’t pencil it on the block first or even make any sketches whatsoever. I just dove in with the cutting gouge. It’s scary to work that way but I wanted a “primitive”, visceral look. As it was, my hand was too smart and they didn’t come out as primitive looking as I had hoped. Another thing I tried was to make several prints of each block.. some light and grayish ranging all the way to really black prints. I used color only a little in a couple of the eventual 11 pieces. I made a collage for the finished pieces, in each case, so that, in every picture, there are different tones of gray and black areas. I also let the block print in a grainy, textural way, in many cases to simulate the feeling I got from the lava rock and sand on the islands. I always print my pieces by hand so they don’t look as slick and “perfect” as they would if I used a press.
So, remember, if you want to plan a trip to an amazingly gorgeous paradise, do not, under any circumstances, consider the Azores… is the advice I always give.
My mother was a “winder”. She worked for the 
