Saturday Morning

This pencil drawing by me was done when I was just 17 years old. It is about the leisures of life represented by items put out on a table to take to a picnic on a Saturday morning. It is only one of four still-lifes that I ever created. My high school art teacher, Danny Gamble, entered it in a state and national competition. It won for the State of Texas and was recognized by the National Scholastics Art Committee as the best pencil drawing in the nation in 1973 by a high school student. The work hung at the U.S. Capitol for a year and then it disappeared. It was never returned. Fortunately, a student journalist took a photo of it and did a story on it in the high school newspaper. I was given a copy of the photo of the artwork. Many years would pass and then I decided to use the photo to create the design in pencil one more time. I tried to recreate the original as close as possible from the photograph and then put it into print. One thing that came out of the drawing besides national recognition, was it would foreshadow my coming style of drawing. It was a style that was less like a pencil sketch and more like a highly finished piece of art and it would begin to show my love for the black and white world of design. It would be another 15 years before that style would come into fruition with the development of a unique way in which I applied the pencil to the paper.