Neral's first mouse, 1984

When I first moved in with Sean, I was so turned on. But not just in the way you might think. You see, as an architect, he had a full home office with a fully supplied drafting area and that was my turn on. The artist in me was turned on by his many different sized rapidograph ink pens and the rainbow of pentel color pens.

I couldn’t wait to have at them. My creativity was boiling and bubbling, just waiting to explode out into the world. Then of course I had a boring job that didn’t require too much brain power either, so that worked in favor of good art too.

I was also very inspired by my first cat, Neral, who was a lynx point Siamese. He caught his first mouse in our late 1800’s house we lived in! He was so proud; he brought it to me in bed. I threw back the covers and there it was. Yeah, that was the last time I let him sleep with us.

I used Sean’s mechanical drafting pencils to draw sketches of Neral, then I filled in the sketch with tiny dots with a small barrel rapidograph pen as you can see. This only half the picture as it was all that would fit on my scanner. This kind of pointillism is very easy to do, but requires infinite patience and a very steady hand. Click to enlarge.

You can see that I was very influenced by Asian art even at this time. It is evident in my graphic sense as well as in the detail of the work. I continued to be stuck in pointillism for years to come. It is a very deliberate and reliable way to produce quality art.

Sean showed me some applications, notably famous artists, such as Seurat, and portraits in the Wall Street Journal. Of course I had to so some portraits immediately, and did portraits of one of Sean’s great aunts when she was a young woman, and old woman, and a self portrait. All but the self portrait are framed. Then, I got a commission to do a portrait of someone’s child and found that I could not do it. To me, a child looks like a featureless ball. There is no character to portray. So, I had to turn down the commission.