Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #11–Valentine’s Day cards.

A selection of some Valentine’s Day cards drawn and colored by my mom. Folded up, what shows is a heart; unfolded, they reveal the whimsical animals and bad puns that are so often found on Valentine’s cards. My mom made cards like this for many years when I was a kid; I remember having them for card exchanges when I was in grade school, and she continued making them when I was older and she was managing the Chemistry Department stockroom at USC.

My mom was a better-than-average artist. There was an artistic streak in her family. An aunt, Fera Webber Shear, was a professional painter, who produced some very nice work, and her mother, in addition to a PhD in botany, had training in the visual arts and wrote and illustrated children’s books. Her parents came from an era when training in biology meant learning how to draw specimens with the accuracy needed for a scientific report, a lost skill which I feel sharpens the eye’s power of observation. Pages from their student lab notebooks, framed, hung on the walls of our house. My mom had, as far as I know, only a small amount of training in the visual arts. Mostly, she just drew and painted a lot, which, if done with intention, is good training on its own. She was prolific, and played in many forms: basket-weaving, natural dying, loom-weaving, embroidery, knitting, printing (including gyotaku), mosaic, painting, sketching, inking, calligraphy, batik, paper craft, sculpting mashed potatoes, and so on. Of my parents’ possessions, her artworks (with the exception of the sadly ephemeral mashed-potato sculptures) were probably the hardest things for my brothers and I to partition when we divvied up my parents’ stuff.

Of the works on paper, there are maybe a dozen or two of botanical paintings, and several more botanical drawings, all of which are worthy of framing. There are also lots and lots of cartoon-ish drawings, including dozens of doodles from when she was bored at work, that are just a delight. I think of most of her art being in these two modes—the very realistic and detailed drawing and painting style of a botanical illustrator, at which she excelled, and a cartoon-y, cute style of drawing, which was absolutely charming. There’s another category, though, where she worked in a sort of formal and refined, yet cartoonish, style, when she was making flyers for clubs and departmental seminars or greeting cards. I think these capture a large part of her essence.

These Valentine’s cards are an example. Each one started as a sketch, which had a certain looseness of line. The sketch was then tightened up, the curves made more careful and a little more restrained, and carefully lined lettering added, as it was transferred to tracing paper. Thus set, the picture and text could then be inked, either with ballpoint or technical pen. The result was a reconciliation of two facets of her personality—very playful, and yet very precise. The art had very clean lines (like the “ligne claire” of Hergé), perhaps a little formal, but still very cartoony, cute, and not at all stiff. The cards would get xeroxed, tinted with watercolor, and handed out to some very lucky folks.

I was taught this mode of expression early on. In the lower grades of elementary school I’d do birthday cards for my dad or a drawing of an animal for a report for class. I’d make a drawing on a bit of scrap paper (often, a recycled seminar flyer!), and my mom might help me to smooth out a line or two. When I felt it was good enough—which was after a great deal of erasing and sketching and more erasing and more sketching, so that the paper was all smudged and grey—she’d give me a soft pencil and I’d lay down a heavy layer of graphite on the back of the paper. Then, we’d tape a clean sheet of better paper to a window, and tape my carbon-backed drawing on top of that, and I’d trace the best line of my original drawing, copying it onto the clean paper. I’d use a hard pencil to darken that traced line, and colored pencils to give the drawing some zip, and I’d have the finished product. It was never as good as my mom’s, but it was ok.

So here I am today, making cartoons and flyers for meetings and silly goat-themed Valentine’s cards every year. I have nowhere near the chops that my mom had as a botanical artist, but I find myself drawing in a cartoonish mode, in a ligne claire style. The drawings are almost all done on an i-Pad with an Apple Pencil, but the process is much the same as what my mom taught me: rough, sketchy, blurry, fussed-over drawing with “soft pencil,” traced with a “harder pencil” to smooth and refine the curves, and then traced again with “technical pen,” and then tinted.

The cartoons are silly, but I do feel a need to draw them as a pressure release from the ridiculousness of life, or in the hopes that other folks will get a slight lift to their day. That’s probably what led my mom, frustrated with boredom and lonely in the basement of USC’s chemistry department, to fill whole pads of paper with goofy drawings, or to make cards for Valentine’s Day. As far as I know, neither of my brothers do much of this. Do I want to draw this way because of how my mom trained me from an early age, or is it something intrinsic about me? I don’t know, it’s just how I currently am. If you give a growing twig just a little bend, would the resultant branch have grown that way only because it was bent, or would it have grown that way anyway? If you ask a tree that question, you’ll get just as meaningful an answer as you’ll get from me. Meantime, I will enjoy and savor my mom’s art, and I will keep drawing.