OFTEN, TO ESCAPE the travails of working at home, I would take a short drive to breathe some stale air at the mall near Stony Brook. It was relaxing, as long as the police didn’t show up looking for marijuana growers.
On one such trip I was attracted to a line-up of traveling artists who earned a small living sketching portraits of shoppers there in the mall corridors. The artists worked mostly in charcoal on 11 by 17 inch sheets of blank wrapping paper. They lugged around flimsy easels and folding stools that were imperative to their services, since they spent most of the days on their butts, waiting (and hoping) for clients.
“Suddenly,” as they too often say in the comic books, I spotted one guy whose works stood out from the rest, like a bright star. He worked in pastels — described in Webster’s Dictionary as “a powdered pigment compressed into small colored sticks for drawing” — on a surface that was similar to thin, fine sandpaper. I was impressed that he respected his work enough that he didn’t render his art on the same material butchers employed to wrap meat.
Pastels are not a new fad. They have been used by more than one of the great masters, led by the incomparable Frenchman Edgar Degas, who had two additional first names, by the way. He lived to the year 1917, when I was four years old and the First World War was coming to an end.
The name of the artist at the mall was Bouche. I know that because it’s how he signed the work I assigned to him. Unfortunately, I cannot remember his first name. That should be a lesson to all of the artists out there — always sign your products.
Monsieur Bouche, obviously also a Frenchman, almost flipped out when I suggested that he do a cover for a national magazine. He had no problem with the title Sick. We worked out the details, then he went off to research his material and actually produce the artwork.
The subject was an adaptation of American Gothic, painted in 1930 by Grant Wood. Sick magazine was running an article featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono masquerading as poor, Depression-era American farmers, which they were not.
I am told that this was the first — and possibly only — pastel cover of a comic book or satire magazine. You can look it up. As to how successful it was, I leave that decision up to those of you who view the art.
As for Monsieur Bouche, he went back to his portrait painting career at malls around the countryside, this time with a blow-up of his Sick magazine cover taped onto his easel. From mall drawings to cover artist, our man was hailed as a hero, and many a small-town newspaper included the cover art in stories honoring his celebrity.
