THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT...

A nice sketch, just a scratchy pen and ink drawing with watercolour, no technical aids, not even any under drawing as far as I can see and reproduced here pretty much life size. An illustration, one of a series recording the day to day life of a boy scout troop... an age of innocence long gone.

And no, they are not by me. Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis might by now have picked up the occasional references to Jonathan @ Artistic Type and may have realised - by dint of the fact that we both share the same surname - that we are related; he is my son. The sketches on this post are however by another member of the family and I have only just realised, when I was writing this post that my father, whose sketches they are, was only 15 when he did them. I had assumed he was at least 18 or 19. In a perfect world he would have loved to have gone on probably to train as a commercial artist, as you did in those days - we are talking of the mid 1930's here. Life however is not that perfect; his parents couldn't afford to send him off to be apprenticed to a studio so he started life as a wages clerk. Conscripted into the RAF he spent the war in a spitfire squadron; postwar he went on to qualify as an accountant and ended up as a financial director.

He never lost his appreciation of art though, and it was through him that I came to appreciate Rembrandt, who was his favorite artist. I never really had the chance to talk to him about these sketches and how he did them, and he would no doubt be highly amused to know that after all this time some of them are now seeing the light of day for the first time, out in the public domain. The sketches are from an exercise book that he kept as a log-book over a period of some six months or so in 1934 -35 and I suppose it's a minor miracle that they survived at all. The sketches are shown here as they appear on the pages - click in the images to increase their size.

They are here now anyway; enjoy them... and just to show that the artistic skills of the family are in safe hands, the final sketch is by Jonathan's daughter Edie Mae, age 4 - my granddaughter. Hey, Dad, its ok - the kids are alright...