Here’s another gem from my cartoonist pal, Randy Enos.
Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl
Back in 2005 when my wife and I visited my ancestral homeland, the Azores, at one point, we stayed on the lovely island of Fayal in a hotel which was once a fortress right on the water’s edge replete with cannons on an upper deck next to a big swimming pool and a castle-like entrance. One afternoon we encountered an American artist and his small group of watercolorists. I’ve known a few guys that did this European tour-thing with a gaggle of amateur artists/students who would sign on for a package deal of touring various countries, lodging, visiting museums and painting with critiques from their instructor-guide. The instructor was an amiable chap and he invited us to sit in on a critique of that day’s watercolors by his little gang of students. One woman had put some words into her picture for some reason which prompted the admonition from the instructor, “Never put words in your pictures!” He explained to her that written words have no place in a piece of art and that it had ruined her picture.
I wondered what he would think of a picture I had made 4 years earlier which I named “Call Me Ishmael” (the most famous opening three words of any American novel). I had been trying to think of a unique way to illustrate my favorite book “Moby Dick” and I had hit upon this idea of doing a large picture consisting of just words… the first page of Moby Dick.
The picture is 26″ X 40″. It’s a linocut. What I like to call a “linocut-collage” because I print on a variety of colored papers inking the block in a variety of colored inks. Then I select parts of each print and paste it all up to create my full color picture.
I penciled in the words in mostly capital letters, inventing shapes with them using positive and negative spaces as the forms presented themselves to me. It’s very hard to exactly explain so I am submitting here a few details from the picture along with a photo of the whole thing to show what I mean.
After I had carved all the lettering, I proceeded to ink the block and print on the colored papers. I stuck to mostly greenish and bluish, waterish colors. I made a blue print, a green print, a purplish print, black print, white print on black paper and so forth. I kept inking the block different colors and printing on many many Pantone papers until I had this bunch of prints. Now all I had to do was select parts of those prints and paste it all up as a collage. First I used one of the prints as a “master” to paste the other little letter forms from the big prints on to it.
I think this was the most satisfyingly creative picture I’ve ever made… full of improvisation.
Mystic Seaport sells giclées of it along with my whaling picture called “New Bedford Boys At Toil”.
When I show this picture to people, I tell them that I’m illustrating Moby Dick and that this is the first page… and I have only 822 pages to go!
Amidst my picture puzzle of letter forms in “Call Me Ishmael”, I have buried a few whaling images. There’s a harpoon, whaling spade, killing lance and a small white whale.
I guess the admonition to me would have to be… “Don’t put pictures in your words!”
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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:
Never Put Words in Your Pictures
Explosion In A Blue Jeans Factory
The Garden of Earthly Delights
When I was a Famous Chinese Watercolorist
A Duck Goes Into a Grocery Store
A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett
The Fastest Illustrator in the World!
Take it Off … Take it ALL Off!
The Funniest Cartoon I’ve Ever Seen
The Beatles had a Few Good Tunes
The Gray Lady (The New York Times)
Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe
The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World
Brought to You in Living Black and White
Art School Days in the Whorehouse
The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce
8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt
The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”
Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School
So, I started e-mailing everybody I could think of, concentrating on the most famous guys in the business. It pays to have been in the work as long as I had because I knew all the famous guys and they liked me. I got a very enthusiastic response. I asked if they would put as many pictures as they’d like in my show. The only requirement would be that the pictures would be about the sea in some form or other. Mystic paid for shipping and framing. Everything would be for sale and Mystic would take a modest percentage from the sales.
The artists that lived in the region came and many stayed over in Mystic courtesy of the Seaport. The next morning, I took everybody on a tour of the Morgan and explained how all the equipment on board functioned and I told of how the whale was processed on the ship in order to extract the valuable whale oil. I was told later by the head of the Seaport that one of their regular ship guides had been standing off to the side listening to me and said, “Who is this guy and how does he know so much about whaling?”