by Marty Coleman | Oct 10, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
Look what I found! The first example of my amazing aptitude for drawing on napkins, haha.
In 1985 I was working as a waiter/manager at Eulipia Restaurant in San Jose, California. I had just graduated from San Jose State University with my M.F.A. and was in my first year of teaching part-time at the college level.
I don’t know who the top two people are, probably a depressed patron and a waitress. The bottom image is of Angelique. I spelled her name ‘Angeleak’ because I had recently completed a large charcoal drawing of her in which I included a visual pun on her name ‘angel + leak’.
Here is that drawing.
 |
| Woman with a Dream of her Mother, 1985 |
Here is a close up of the pun.
Drawing by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Oct 3, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
I used to take public transportation often. I loved drawing while on a bus, subway or train. There is something liberating about knowing you can’t control the line, you just have to create within the parameters of a jostling, bumpy series of movements. It’s a great exercise in gesture drawing for one, but it’s also great for allowing for the happy mistake again and again.
This was actually a woman I saw on the train. She had the headband and she had the strong angular look. I didn’t draw her while looking at her, she was just someone I saw passing, but I remembered the look and had her in mind as I made up this drawing. Why I added the tie and the mini-story, I have no idea, but it made sense at the time!
Here is another from that same train ride.
Drawings © 2016 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Sep 26, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
While in the MFA program at San Jose State University ( I had left Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan after one year without an MFA) I started doing large scale photorealist drawings of people and objects that also included large expanses of grass.
At the same time I got into word play with the word ‘draw’ and its variations. This sketch combined those elements into what I thought was a pretty funny image.
Here are some other drawn things from that same sketchbook.
Drawings © 2016 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Sep 19, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
See, even back in 1982 I was drawing in church!
In 1982, after we moved to San Jose from a year in Michigan, Kathy and I found out about this little church in San Jose called ‘Bread of Life’. There had to be no more than 50 people max that attended. As a result we became fast friends with many of the group.
Here is an example of what a finished sketchbook drawing of the time looked like.
Here is an example of a faster drawing that if I had kept going would end up similar in style to the guitar drawing above.
The woman drawn here, Nita, and her husband Michael (not the guy playing guitar above) became our best friends for many many years during our stay in San Jose, even after we moved on from that church.
Drawings by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Aug 29, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
In 1981 I was still in graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. I was contemplating doing a multi-colored woodcut dealing with the idea of distraction. For me, a young male at the time, an obvious example of distraction was a man paying attention to a woman when he should be paying attention to something else. I did a series of sketches on this idea.
Drawing © 2016 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Aug 22, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
Today we travel to 1980
In 1980 we move to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan so I could attend graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. I started thinking about narrative ideas and images for our initial assignment in the printmaking department. We had to do a suite of 10 prints in an edition of 10. We had to use all four printmaking processes (intaglio, lithography, serigraph, and woodcut). We also had to create a collophon title page using a typesetting press and a portfolio for the prints to be kept in. We had 2 weeks to complete the assignment.
This was in my sketchbook as one possible direction to go. I eventually chose to do a series of images surrounding my having been burned over 70% of my body 7 years earlier instead.
Drawing by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Aug 8, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
The Bomber Jacket
 |
| Skeets Coleman (2nd from right), 1942 – Goleta, Calif. |
When I was negative 13 years old (1942) my father became a US Marine. He was assigned to a fighter/bomber squadron training in Goleta, California. Later it would be the home of University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his bomber jacket at that time. Here is a photo of him in Goleta with his jacket on, and with some really tall guys. I found this online at his squadron’s website.
When I was growing up I would wear it for fun around the house. A guy’s version of playing ‘dress up’. I wore it quite a bit in high school and when I left for college I took it with me, with his blessing. In 1977, when I was a positive 22 years old, 35 years after his training at Goleta, I ended up in the same location with the same jacket. I was an art student at UC Santa Barbara. Here is a drawing I did of that same jacket in 1977, hanging outside my closet in my apartment.
I was drawing it because I had gotten it refurbished (if that is the right term for a jacket). I found a leather restorer (oh yea, that’s the term) and had him put in new lining to match the old, new elastic trim at the bottom, resew and restore the leather as best he could. I was very proud of it and thought looked great. I wore it for many, many years after that. Eventually I got too round and the jacket got too worn and I put it away.
After it was retired I bought and wore many bomber style leather jackets. It wasn’t the same but I always bought those because I liked the connection to the original.
I still have the jacket of course and to bring this sketchbook history tour full circle, I thought I would take a photo of myself in it. I am the same age now as he was when he gave it to me so many years ago.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Aug 1, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
Sketchbook History Tour – 1976
Pete waking up Rusty after a Hard Night at the Roxy
In October, 1975 I was forced to leave Brandeis University. My family just couldn’t afford it anymore. Around the same time several of my best high school friends decided to take a year off from college and move to Hollywood. Pete and I drove his Thunderbird across the country and I started this sketchbook at the beginning of the trip. We hung out at my Uncle Steve’s house in Pacific Palisades for a couple weeks until Rusty and JJ joined us. We found an apartment just north of Hollywood and Vine.
Pete and Rusty got jobs at the Roxy on Sunset Strip as doormen. It was wild hours and wild times. I was drawing the living room with Pete just sitting there and Rusty crashed on a small mattress we had thrown down on the floor. For some reason Pete had to wake Rusty up and kept kicking him in the head to do it. I captured the moment.
I moved out eventually to a place that was a bit less crazy. I got residency in California and moved up the coast to finish college at UC Santa Barbara, which I did in 1978.
Drawing and story © 2016 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Jul 25, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour, Sunday |
Sketchbook History Tour – 1973.
I have sketchbooks dating back to 1971. Each Sunday I will post a drawing, going through the years.
 |
| Sunbather at a Country Club, 1973 |
During the summer after I graduated from High School I got blown up in a boat explosion. My recuperation took place at my parent’s home in Virginia. I got a job life guarding at a local pool inside a country club. I used my off time to continue drawing. A frequent visitor to the pool allowed me to draw her sunbathing. Sunbathers are great models for artists of course since they sit still for long periods of time. She was no exception.
Drawing by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Marty Coleman | Jul 18, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour |
Remember last week I mentioned I had counted up my sketchbooks and I found I had 29 of them? I decided to to through them and pick out one per year to post on Sundays for a while. This is from the first sketchbook (1971-1973). I was 17 when I painted this, my junior year of high school.
This portrait is of a family friend, Bruce Hall. We moved to Darien, CT because of his mother, Helene. My mother met her in a grocery store in Maryland in the 50s. Over 15 years later, when we were going to move to the east coast from the west, we focused our home search in the same town where Helene lived.
I don’t remember any of the specifics of why I was doing this portrait of Bruce, but I suspect Helene was encouraging me to do it. She was a great artist, working in painting and sculpture. She was the second major influence on me as an artist, after my grandfather, who had passed away by this time. She encouraged me and pushed me to understand what being an artist was really all about.
Helene was a brassy, ballsy broad in the classic definition (think Rosalind Russell in Mame). She took no prisoners when she saw pretention or hypocrisy. She was funny as hell. All obvious reasons why my mother and she became friends from a simple grocery store encounter. How I would have liked to have been in that aisle when they met, I can just imagine how funny they were and how they caught each other’s attention as a result.
She once challenged me to try to create something as good as a Picasso sculpture I saw at the Museum of Modern Art on a visit there with her. I said the typical ‘Anyone could do that’ and she stopped me in my tracks and said, then do it. I actually did attempt to create a wire sculpture (this was when I was about 13) and failed miserably. The lesson was learned. It wasn’t a question of IF you could do it. It was a question of DO YOU DO IT. When it gets to that question the bigger question arises. WHY are you doing it. And that changes you from being a critic to being an artist.
Helene is now 91 or so. She is taken care of by Bruce and his son, Evan. Both great guys!
Like this:
Like Loading...
