THROWBACK THURSDAY: The US South, Southwest and West; Summer 1961
SKETCHING THE WEST (KIND OF)
In 1961, my family went on a six-week odyssey that’s enshrined in our history as “the Western Trip.”
We happened to hit Disneyland on July 4th, and almost had the place to ourselves because everybody else assumed it would be crowded. Then we visited San Francisco and Berkeley, where my Uncle Jim and his family were on a sabbatical from Cornell, and living in a house where Carl Jung had stayed on visits to the University. Then up the coast on Route 1, etc., etc.
It was quite the long haul, and then as now, I tended to crave a lot of “alone time”—hard to come by when traveling as a family pod.
My go-to tactic became wandering off and ensconcing myself behind my sketchbook, rendering my own unconventional take on the places we visited. (I should mention that at the time, I tended to draw a lot of cartoon mice.)
Recently, going through some stored memorabilia, I found a collection of musty sketchbooks, dating from 1959 to 1962. (I stopped drawing when I got to college and roomed with students doing “Serious Art.”)
Among the sketches were those I’d made on the Western Trip. About the same time, my brother, who was 11 in 1961, sent me a collection of my dad’s wonderful photos from that summer.
How could I not combine some of them?
(Note: Although Dad took some spectacular shots of scenery, I've mostly used human-interest pics here.)
