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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DeadtoRights:Confessionsof a Caricaturist . . . and all the nice people will only see the exaggeration as caricature. —Vincent van Gogh Early Influences I n kindergarten, when I presented her with crayon drawings of the Queen Mary and of the Empire State Building lit up like a Christmas tree at night, Mrs. Decker kissed my cheek, my first taste of artistic glory. By fifth grade already I was drawing faces. At the summer camp where my parents sent me (called Silver Lake, though on the map the same body of water went by “Mudge Pond”), I sat with a nineteen-cent Bic and notebook at a picnic table and “did” everyone, portraits the size of postage stamps. My likenesses may have been hit or miss, but I was a hit. Thanks to my drawing pen, for the first time I felt popular. Heather McGowan even agreed to go out on a canoe with me. The canoe tipped over. Still, I felt triumphant. In high school I drew Mr. Schnabel, with his manatee nose and outrageous comb-over, and Mrs. Rigsdale, my French teacher, with her twisting Carvel cone of white hair. Those teachers with a sense of humor praised my talent; the rest sent me down to Mr. DeMillo’s office . Since I was of Italian lineage, like him, Principal DeMillo found me simpatico. Seeing my latest artistic affront, he shook his bald-as-abowling -ball head, but could not contain a smile. “Pete,” he said, “in choosing your subjects you need to exercise more discretion.” On the other hand he had to admit that I’d gotten Mrs. Rigsdale “dead to rights.” To pin someone’s likeness to a page in a few deft strokes, to snatch not only people’s faces but their souls from thin air, to own them on 2 Dead to Rights paper, there was magic in it, something talismanic and even voodoolike . In sketching them I distilled their essences, and could do with those essences what I pleased. Heady powers for a teenager. My artistic gods were Vincent van Gogh and Mort Drucker. The first cut off an ear and painted burning cypresses under pinwheel skies at night. The second you would know if, like most late baby boomers , you grew up on MAD magazine. Drucker drew the movie satires, comic-book-style parodies of the latest movies. If van Gogh was the god of color, Drucker was the god of line. What that man couldn’t do with a pen and ink. With the faintest thickening of stroke he’d render the shadow under a nose or a shirt cuff. No one, not even Al Hirschfeld—whose style I found too “arty”—could better Drucker’s likenesses. His Paul Newman looked more like Paul Newman than Paul Newman. He got their gestures, down, too: Brando scratching his jaw in The Godfather, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas each clenching three rows of teeth, Cary Grant always leaning slightly, like the Tower of Pisa, Katherine Ross ever on the verge of tears. Through high school I taught myself to draw just like Drucker, carrying notebook and pen with me everywhere. When friends got sick of my drawing them, I worked from photos of movie stars. After graduating, not knowing what else to do with my life, I took a job as the helper on a furniture truck and kept my notebook with me as we rode to Wappinger’s Falls to deliver a sofa bed, and to Great Barrington with someone’s grandfather clock. The warehouse guys called me Leo, as in Leonardo da Vinci, and didn’t mind my drawing them as long as I didn’t make their beer bellies too big. Going to art school felt more like a defeat than a decision. Drawing had been a personal, semi-intimate pleasure, with a tinge of naughtiness about it, like good sex. To expose it to pedagogy seemed a bad idea. My professors swiftly set to work to cure me of my bad habit, as if drawing caricatures were the equivalent not of sex but of something less productive, like nose or toenail picking. My protests—that Leonardo, Daumier, Monet, and Picasso, to name a few, had all been caricaturists—fell on deaf ears. An unrepentant sinner, I practiced my vice in secret, doodling likenesses of the model’s face (we’d been instructed to ignore faces and genitals) on a corner of my newsprint pad, obliterating them with charcoal whenever the moderator came by...

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