"Do You Like What You Do?"

I have been drawing, painting, sketching, just about creating any type of caricature imaginable for some time now. Don’t ask me the amount of caricatures I have drawn, because I really have no idea. To take a smidgen of a guess, I would have to say it must be close to a thousand, or a little over. It is hard to say. What I can say is that I enjoy the process and completion of good caricature.

I should state that with gusto, as lately, I have had some tough situations happen to me (see past blogs for details). In the past, nothing would cheer my spirit up more, than for me to sit at my drawing table and sketch or ink or design a new caricature. No matter how my life is going, I felt that I had the control, by drawing a caricature. I seemed to have a feel, or vision of how I want the final piece to look, and what I need to do to accomplish the task. To finish a difficult or even an easy caricature was my way of “winning”.

It does not come as easy. There could be so many preliminary sketches and the amount of research that has to be done. I guess I am lucky enough to have access to the internet. I can look up an image, print it and use it for reference on a painting in a few minutes. Besides pictures, there are many caricaturist friend I know who I could ask in confidence. How to attack a particular face or facial characteristic, questions like that. This saves time and gets me on the right path. Preliminary sketches are basically the game plan of what I was thinking the final project should turn out to be. There is no limit on how many sketches I make beforehand, but there has to be some light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.

The title of this blog refers to a question that tends to pop-up quite often when I draw for events. Sometimes it is only asked once, sometimes twice, occasionally all the time. It all depends. If I feel good about my work and people are happy with what I draw, than definitely I like what I do. The times when nothing seems to go right and people get cranky, and upset for waiting so long, it is harder to say, “Yeah this is great!” That may seem like a lie, and maybe it is, but this is where my God-given talent sits within me.

I enjoy creating something that no one has ever seen before.

I like taking an idea from deep within myself, and letting it shine through me, to show the rest of the world or to a select few.

I enjoy seeing the looks of people, when they first recognize themselves.

I like talking to people, before, during and after the project is completed. It is a way for me to express myself twice at one time.

I enjoy making new connections, either socially or in business.

These are things that could have only been accomplished by my learning how to caricature people many years ago. It is a skill that can be taught, read about, or just siphoned from the inner workings of the soul.

The skill to caricature, has not come easy, nor was it so difficult for me to give up. I knew that I could accomplish what I set out to do. It just takes work and dedication to handle the work.

I started when I was young and I knew what I was doing when I was 10. I developed my skills through high school and my early 20’s. After a brief lapse of re-learning everything, (after cancer) I improved and my style changed.

Today, I can answer the question with a definitive “YES! This is what I do.”

The Art of Caricature (according to me)

As I sheepishly titled this blog ( I am not one to brag) I realized that it was 30 some odd years ago that I found my one true gift in life. It was a Friday, much like today, in the afternoon that I discovered what my real talent was. 

For those that do not know the history of how I got going in caricature, it started even before this period. I was young. So young, I do not remember when this had happened first, but I do recall, when I was 4, that I would draw some weird pictures of faces. I say “weird” because it was basically the whole page of paper and a little sliver of a body on the botton. My parents thought there was something very strange about that. So, like good, loving parents that they were (and are), brought me to see a specialist.

At first I thought that “everyone that was 4” saw this specialist and that she must have liked my drawings because she kept asking for them. I was happy to oblige and I really liked to draw and color. Eventually I was told that what I was drawing, did not make sense. People do not have enormous heads and little bodies. That surprised me because on tv I saw Sigmund the Sea Monster and LiddVille and Ronald McDonald commercials with Mayor McCheese and Officer Big Mac.

“No, you are drawing wrong!”

“But that is what I draw. See I don’t need to make a frame because the paper is at the end on these three sides!”

“NO, everything has a frame and they have to fit on the paper!” I really do not remember who actually said this but I can recall that it was a younger lady that looked like Debbie Boone. Or maybe I thought she looked like Debbie Boone. “You Light Up My Life” was pretty popular at the time.

Anyway…

This conversation kept going on and I really did not know what to make of it. I would get my ears checked, which made no sense at all. What do your ears have to do with big heads and little bodies on a 4 year-old boy’s drawings?

Eventually I went to Kindergarten, which was fine by me. On the first day we had to draw ourselves and I did. Mrs. Voght, my Kindergarten teacher, politely said “we don’t draw like that in this school.” I guess it was a rule so I did not draw like that again.

Now years later, I figured out that there were no written laws about head size in the school. But at the time, I moved to a new way of drawing “normal” people with not as big of heads. Everything seemed to go pretty swell….

UNTIL!

February 1st, 1984. My fourth grade class was watching a PBS show during milk break. In Wisconsin, we have little cartons of milk (usually chocolate) and it is a big deal to be milk monitor. Maybe I will save that story for June, because it is Dairy Appreciation Month.

Anyway, I am watching this show. It is a recurring show that my teacher Mrs. Lorrigan must like, because she hushes anyone in the classroom that whispers. As I watching this show with a guy (the host) wearing overalls announcing stories, I am fascinated by the illustrator who uses pastels to create the pictures, while an off-camera voice reads the story. It is amazing! Perfectly timed too.

Eventually the story only goes so far and the Overalls Man ( I will call him Mr. Lennox) starts to talk about “caricature”. He then shows a few pictures of the Presidnts and asks us (but to me it seems like he is addressing just me) “What characteristics does George Washington have? What features did Abraham Lincoln have? What sticks out for President Kennedy?”

I was enthalled! There was a word that described what I did! CARICATURE! I remember looking at the newspaper and seeing the comics page and then moving to the front and seeing pictures of President Carter and Uncle Sam….. I was not drawing people with bulbous heads when I was 4! I was trying to draw caricatures!

Suddenly, Mrs. Lorrigan turned the lights back on and turned off the television. She saw I was enamored by the program. She also knew that I could draw.

“Say Dean, you draw pretty well. Why don’t you draw a caricature of Jenny Cook.”

I started right away, and it went by in a complete blur. All the kids hovered around me and kind of laughed and ohh’ed and ahh’ed. Jenny seemed to like the caricature and the rest of the class wanted me to draw them too. I did and from that moment on, I felt like I had a purpose!

I was to preach the praise of caricature. I read books about caricature, I created caricatures out of clay, and taught classes about it (really, I did! In 7th grade I taught the art class how to caricature) and I had a purpose and I was famous for it. 

It surely changed my life, from that moment on.

Presently, I am looking at all the copies of caricatures that I have had signed by celebrities and I count over 200. I am amazed because 15 years ago I lost the feelings in my hands due to chemotherapy. I worked my way back to where I was as an artist and I feel like I have improved tremendously. I am awed at the patience my teachers gave me in those early years. The opportunities that were given to me to share my gift are too numerous to tell, but I truly appreciate every one of them.

Here’s to more caricaturing in the future for me!

2012 Where did it go?

As I sit in front of my loyal computer, I noticed that I did not write about much or during the year of 2012. Now for followers of my blog, I can see that this is a big deal! How could you go with almost a year and a half without hearing or reading about yours truly? Well I am here to remedy that and to catch you up on things…

For starters I am unemployed. Yes, I am like 9.8 million Americans out in America that are unemployed. It started with the school I was teaching at, part-time. I was teaching there , part-time, for close to 11 years. I had a good feeling about teaching at this school, as I went to this same school many years ago. I taught on Monday mornings and Wednesday mornings, and in the afternoons I would work the night shift at the library. It worked out quite well, especially for a part-time job.

I gave grades and had parent/teacher meetings and I even had a schedule of projects to do for all of my students, Kindergarten through eighth grade. For the most part, 90% of the students enjoyed the class. The teachers and even the principal backed me up. I thought that this was a great thing to do for future artists especially part-time. Until….

September 2011, a new principal came into St. Peter the Fisherman Catholic Grade School. She had ties to the city and Fr. Tom, the Parish priest, really fought hard for her to come back to TR from Green Bay. That she did, with a passion.

At first she was all-clean and squeaky and did not want to make waves. That lasted until August when she wanted me to create some “Something Fishy…” fish for the whole staff and to paint a mural on our school wall. I took up both challenges and thought I did a good job. Apparently not, as the new principal had my mural painted over in a week and my fish were an afterthought at orientation. I should have known that something was up, but I must have had some blinders on. “No big deal,” I said in public, which in reality, it was.

In January of 2012, was when I really noticed something was up. I was called into the office of the principal! I know that rarely happened when I was a student. But I was called into the office and was verbally reprimanded and forced to sign a letter of reprimand. Not once, not twice, but three times on three different occasions. Where was this sweet principal who loved my ideas in the Spring of 2011? She aint here now.

After being called in for the third time, I let it be known that I will not come back to school next year, which I think was her plan to begin with. It just seemed that she wanted her say, her people in her school, and her way unquestioned. All I wanted to do was teach art and get paid for that. So I chose not to be renewed. 4 other teachers were not as lucky to make that decision as they were fired. One of which was my 3rd grade teacher! She was there for almost 30 years!

So with the stress of not having to teach for a school year not happening, I thought I could work at the library and maybe gain some more hours. I even applied for the position of my supervisor who was retiring. I did not get that job, and I ended up teaching her replacement some library stuff.

I must have taught her too well, as of October 4, 2012, I was releived of my duties at the library. I worked there for 15 years and they kicked me out the door without defending myself. The director had a whole 7 pages of indiscretions that I could not defend because they wouldn’t let me, and they had made their decision. I was fired.

They replaced me with 2 people who work only 11 hours a week. I worked 25 hours a week. The director even said I was welcome to come back as a patron, because “we still value you as a patron of the library”.

I have yet to go back there.

So now I am on the cusp of going back to school to educate myself in graphic design and marketing. It is a new chapter in my life and I look at it as a new challenge, scary, adventurous, exciting and new. I hope I can build on this new opportunity.

They say it takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a city to throw that child away. I feel that my city, my library, my church and my faith, have let me down and I am the only one that can get me back on track. I have the support of my family and a few friends, but during a situation like this, you really get to know who your true friends are.

Hoping your 2013 is a better than my 2012.

The Street Where You Live

All my life I have used Monroe Street as the street I have lived on. Basically it is and was the only street I have set up as my home. I was born and raised and still live on Monroe Street, Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

Now the interesting thing about streets in Two Rivers is that the streets that go north and south are numeric and the streets that go east and West are usually named for Presidents. There are a few exceptions such as Lowell, Viceroy and Buchholz. Granted they are not famous Presidents but apparently famous enough to name a street after. Plus I do not think that Buchholz was named after the 7th member of the Magnificent Seven, Horst Buchholz.

Another funny thing about the streets in Two Rivers, besides the fact that they break off and continue in different ways, is that the Presidential streets do not go in order at all. Washington Street is consider the city’s “Main Street” due to the fact that it led to the old high  public school, Two Rivers Washington High School. So that makes sense to put it there. Right next to Washington, or sandwiched on both sides are the streets Adams Street which is named after the 2nd and 6th Presidents and the one north of it named after Thomas Jefferson, the third President…..hmmmmm. Now it will get confusing…

Adams Street is north of my street, Monroe, named after James Monroe the fifth President and not named after the character Jim J. Bullock played on Too Close for Comfort. So you go off of the Madison Street Bridge (named for the 4th President and the Father of the U.S. Constitution) and you can turn onto Monroe Street or go to Adams Street or Washington or a little farther and go to Jefferson Street. You see the numbered streets are in order but not the Presidents.

Once you go farther to the North the Presidents are really jazzed up.There is Polk, Taft, Pierce, Garfield, Jackson and Johnson Drive. Not to mention Zlatnik Drive who was not named after any President at least American. Somehow it seemed that if someone on the street that was unnamed picked a President regardless of the order of which they came. On the Southside there is a Roosevelt Avenue which could have been named for the 26th or the 32nd President. So needles to say most visitors do get lost or confused by our city and our streets even if they knew the order of the Presidents or not.

I remember as a kid sitting on the bus going home and talking about the streets where the kids lived. One boy said he lived on Jackson Street named after Reggie Jackson or Michael Jackson. Another boy lived on Garfield who was named after the popular cartoon cat. I lived on Monroe and I could only think of that character from the Ted Knight show mentioned above. We had a clue of who the streets were really named for, but it was fun to think that there are other people with the same names as our Presidents.

In fact after discussing these names, one kid mentioned he lived on Jefferson Street and that he was “movin’ on up” to Jackson Street to live with the Drummond brothers.

“Whacha Talkin’ ‘bout, Jimmy?” was the quick answer and it made us all laugh. In fact the bus driver had to stop the bus and scold us for causing a ruckus. Which was an everyday occurrence. But that is another story for another time.

Why did my parents send me to BAND camp?

As I was perusing my schedule, it dawned on me that this was about the time of the year that I began to dread as a 10-13 year-old. No, it had nothing to do with fireworks ( that happened when i was 4-9 years old). It had to do with the Summer deportation of youngsters 45 minutes away to UWGB for the annual Summer Band and Choral Camp.

Oh how I hated it and feared it too.

You see, I did not like spending the whole day playing music, learning music, listening to music, rehearsing music and especially hanging around other kids who thought the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, the music was fine. It was the dealing with the kids my own age that I had a problem with and their attitudes….maybe that was a precursor of things to come later in my own life?

Anyway, for those that did not know, my Dad is an accomplished musician, so everyone in the family took music lessons. Everyone payed in the City Band. Everyone (except yours truly) took piano lessons…more on that later on a different blog. So at some point of a young Konop’s life, you had to go to Band Camp in Green Bay. It was a learning experience, or so it was said or more likely drilled in our brains.

Back then all the schools in the Lakehore area had a Band Boosters Club that joined all the middle schools together to get funding for instruments, music and the chance to win an all-paid scholarship to spend one week on the campus of the University of Green Bay-Wisconsin with room and board and meals! Wow! The rest of us had to pay our way in. Or sell candy bars to defray the cost.

To the young person, I thought that it was a waste of my valuable Summer experience time. Stuck inside a stinky concert hall or crammed into a sweaty classroom with a bunch of kids that want nothing to do with the music but are stuck there because “it will do us good!” As I look back on the experience I wonder how many of those hundreds of kids still have an instrument and if they still play it? I think I am one of the few.

To begin the week, we have to schlep up to UWGB and register. Then we have perform or audition. What do we perform? Usually a sight-reading of music that a section leader listens to see where we sit in the three orchestras. The Choral people had it easy as they just had to move from one area to another and not have to haul his or her instrument all the way through campus. Pity the tuba, bass saxophone players, and other big instrument players. I had it easy at least. I just had my faithful Reynolds Cornet. It was light and I could handle it. My nerves on the other hand, not so easy to handle.

Besides auditioning, each student had to take a musical written test to show aptitude and ability. I did okay on this for the most part, but because I never had more than a few piano lessons, I had no idea about keys or piano sharps or flats….which was part of my downfall. In consequent years, I studied for that test, but it was no use. My fate was sealed, I would be in the Band C (which I would guess to be the remedial band) playing 3rd and fouth chair. How humiliating….

Besides letting myself down for being in the lowest band and being one of the lowest guys in the section, I was pretty much pigeon-holed into taking remedial music classes so I could learn the notes on a scale and a G-scale and an A-scale and to figure out what key you are in by looking at the scale. Looking back at this I have found not once did I need this and I have been playing in the City band for close to 25 years. I mean really…who gives a crap if the song goes from a major to a minor? All you should care about is if it sounds good. I am not composing the music, which I think I would have liked to do if they would have given me the chance to learn, but no I had to do a B flat scale and I still goofed that up!

My older sisters loved BAND Camp. My brother was Big man on Campus at BAND camp. I hated it cause I was the lowest schnook on the whole campus. Check that. I was close to the lowest schnook. That kid ended up going home because he was homesick. So when he left, the cheese stood alone in a see of flouriscent colored t-shirts and teenagers that I swear had their own kids and mustaches permanantly grown for at least 2 years.

Hardly-peach-whiskered me, sat alone most of my lunchtimes, just watching the clock. I wanted to make sure I was not late for classes and rehearsals because being chewed out by the college-student instructors and directors would be the end of the world for me. I just kept a low-profile and did what they said. In fact I cut my lunches short for two reasons. One, to make sure I would get on class on time, I would walk over to the closed building and wait and two, my stomach could not take the peanut butter sandwich and aluminum-foiled can of soda my Mom made for me that morning. I was too nervous. The whole week was like that!

I really hated the whole experience. The audition, the kids at camp, the snotty girls, the guys you thought were your friends but by Wednesday they cut you out completely, the short shorts I wore which was not a good thing at the time. I had no fun whatsoever at all from Sunday to Thursday. Friday was the worst.

Friday was the night that the whole campus had a big dance to commerate the end of the camp. The University thought this was a great way to have the boarding kids mix with the bussed-in kids. Normally you would have the bussed kids leave at 3 and then activities for the others would inclide a movie or something like bowling to keep the snots busy. Musicians are fine but it was those choral kids that got off scott-free because they only had to freaking sing! But I digress….

Now, I don’t know about you, but I was in no mood to dance the night away. I was petrified of girls, they made fun of me and basically spending a long evening in a place where I did not want to be was not my idea of a relaxing night. But the buses stayed there or left us on that forsken island and we had to fend for ourselves. “We” meaning the “not-suave lothario teenage boys”. Needless to say it was a long night and by the time we got home we had to sleep because the next day we had our big concert.

If you ever had to sit through a junior high concert for 4 hours, I will give you credit. But this was a 8 hour concert that my parents wanted to see the WHOLE thing! My Dad figured it would be a smart idea to get there earlier and stay late to avoid traffic. It was bad enough when I had 3 siblings in this show and I had to watch, now I had to do the same thing for kids I could not stand to be with for another day…but here they are performing not just my band but the whole stinking show. So it was not only the whole week that was lost but the Saturday too. Listening to off-key versions of Aaron Copland and Italian composers…mmmmm sounds like fun!

It was not until my younger sister Dawn, actually had the chance to go to Band Camp that my deepest feelings for that week were actually voiced. She hated it as much as I did. Maybe it was a generational thing? Maybe it was not the time to be social butterflies but all I know if the three older Konop children loved it and the two younger ones hated it.

So I guess I have to end this by saying one thing. With all the kids who went through UWGB Music Camps….how many are still involved with music? I look at my class alone and I think I am one of the few that still plays an instrument, and I was the last guy in our section! That still bothers me. Thanks alot UWGB-Wisconsin Summer Camp!