In order to keep my drawing skills happening and provide you with the best art and art by-products, I must find interesting things to draw. Since I don't find a parking lot full of cars very interesting, I must turn to things I find inside my dwelling, the way the "Sustainably Creative" artist Michael Nobbs does. Fortunately I have all sorts of interesting things in my home, which other people might call "clutter." This imitation railroad lantern is one of them. It sits on my windowsill and is silver in color. I love these railroad lanterns and have two more, one in red and one in green, in honor of the comic book superhero "Green Lantern." They are one of my ways of reminding myself of the historical industrial and rural world outside the new city where I live. The lanterns, though, are all made in China.
This one, branded as the "Olde Brooklyn Lantern," was widely marketed on television and my father, in his later days, bought a lot of them because the TV offered bargains on them that he couldn't resist. The "bargains" turned out to include a lot of defective Brooklyn Lanterns that would not light up. This one I have here is one of the ones that worked. Unlike the traditional kerosene and wick lantern, this one works on batteries and LED mini-bulbs and emits a pale purplish light. Despite its mainly decorative quality, it is not completely useless. When I was stranded in a hotel in New Jersey without electric power or lights during Hurricane Sandy, my Brooklyn Lantern was quite useful to light my way around the room.
Pitt technical pen black ink on sketchbook page, 4" x 6", August 28, 2014.
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