Dean Konop, Caricaturist
Growing up, Dean's parents, Don and Dorothy, noticed something peculiar of their second son and fourth child. Dean's mom noticed it first. As she tells it:
"Dean would be sitting at his high chair while I made lunch or dinner. To keep him occupied I would give him paper and crayons to scribble on. As I started to make a meal, I noticed that Dean would take a crayon and put dots on the paper with a lot of force. I didn't think that was anything out of the ordinary, as our three other children also did that when they were younger. As I went back to work, the clanging of the crayon stopped. I turned around and Dean was connecting the dots he made. He was less than two years old. When Dean was four, he would draw pictures of people. He would use 90% of the paper to make the head. The rest of the paper was a tiny body. I thought something must be wrong with his perception so we sent him to a few specialists and they said he was simply a normal boy. Fifteen years later we realized that he was just drawing caricatures at that young age."
"As far as I can remember, I have always loved art and drawing," Dean states. "Caricatures just seemed to be my thing as I was told by my teachers that I can get the best look and feel for a person by drawing them. I drew my first offical caricature in Mrs. Lorrigan's fourth grade class after we saw a show about cartoons and caricatures. She knew I drew well so she challenged me to draw a student. I drew the entire class."
After years of drawing for teachers, and even teaching his classmates the finer points of caricature though grade school and high school, Dean decided to go to Silver Lake College, a small liberal arts school in neighboring Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Although he had offers to go to The Milwaukee School of Art and Design (MIAD) and Suomi, a school in the Upper Peninsula, Konop chose SLC as it was close to home and he could still work locally. Before graduation in his Junior year, Dean had a severe bloody nose. Thinking it was allergies, he went in to the doctor and was told it was cancer. Dean was given five weeks to live.
"I never thought of dying and now this was put on my shoulders. I had to make a decision and fast. I could have gone to Madison or New York for treatment but instead I put my life in the hands of my doctors in the Lakeshore area"
Although he was fighting cancer and getting the effects of chemotherapy and radiation out of his system, Dean continued to draw. His hands would turn numb as the nerves were repairing themselves from the harsh effects of the chemo. What did he draw? Caricatures. After a full year of drawing caricatures, he decided to send them to the celebrities he drew. Finding a book of addresses in the library, Dean quickly sent them out and they would come back signed. Although they were crude versions of the caricatures you see now, they inspired Konop to continue the fight against cancer.
Those five weeks of living turned out to be over ten years cancer-free. "And I hope more! A lot more!" Dean says enthusiastically.