The only animal that I can draw well is a cat. And this is mostly when I have a real cat in front of me to draw. I'm the same way with drawing people, I can draw someone all right as long as they are actually there in front of me. These two folks are my neighbor across the street in Cambridge, Massachusetts and her cat, "Red." I lived in Cambridge from 1977 to 1988 when I moved away to the Metro DC area. My neighborhood in Cambridge was kind of urban-idyllic as I remember back through the mist of time. In reality, it was a high crime area in which my apartment was broken into and I stopped more than one crime just by being there to chase the would-be perpetrator away. The lady is probably long gone but I remember spending many visits with her just "shooting the breeze." She ran a boarding house for students who lived on the upper floors of her large old house. She also was required by some peculiar arrangement to house people who were moving out of mental hospitals back into the general population and this did not always go well. When the lady retired from this caretaker job, she went into elder housing (along with her cat, though not the one depicted here) and the house became a "halfway house" entirely rather than a boarding house for students. All the people I used to know there are gone and Harvard has transformed a large area there into their new science center.
Technical pen black ink on sketchbook page, about 8" x 4 1/2", June 1984. More than 30 years ago.
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