This was an original post I had on my previous blog, I don’t remember exactly what I had said, but the gist of it was that in the early 90s I worked at a small community newspaper publisher that distributed free weeklies around the New York City area. At the time I was working in the classifieds, this was still the era of cut and paste and wax machines although a lot of the design and layout was done on the Mac. I created a great little scripted FileMaker Pro Database application that laid out galleys of the weekly classifieds and notified sales of upcoming ads that were due for renewal that saved us a lot of time. I loved that application and used it for many years in the various jobs I had since that one. It was a flat database then, and I’ve not come across it since it went relational.

So back to how I happened to do a David Patterson caricature…

David Patterson, who is currently the sitting Governor of New York State (after Elliot Spitzer was forced out by a sex scandal) was just a West Side State Senator in the late 1990s. The paper I worked at was doing  a cover story on his career as a local politician, and the editor asked if I would do a color illustration for the cover. I jumped at the chance and grabbed as many references I could find of him. It was interesting to me that though he was legally blind, he easily could have been mistaken for a sighted person, especially since he didn’t like to cover his eyes, as many blind people are more comfortable doing.

What eventually happened was that the publisher chickened out and decided to pull it from the cover, though it did lead the article on the inside, but in black and white. I was pretty young at the time and I remember being very bitter about the decision. There was talk of being perceived as being racist in the neighborhood that the paper was distributed in, which was to me, a totally lame reason, then why publish it at all? I was perfectly willing to stand up to any criticism and stand by my work, they weren’t though which made me lose a lot of respect for them.

Patterson illustration as published in Black and White

Racist depictions of black people are racist because they are not based on real people or observation, but completely on stereotypes and a lack of any observation or reality. Caricatures are not just “funny drawings” sometimes they can be deadly serious, they can be mean and viscous or sympathetic and poignant, to just label them as “funny” is to belittle their contribution to modern society. They can depict a racist idea or an inclusive one, but the caricature, the depiction of the REAL person in and of itself should not be racist, a good caricature should show the truth about the person being depicted, and the artist him/herself will always inject a certain amount of themselves into the work. There will definitely be more  on this topic to come, but for now, let’s just say I was not that happy with how it ended.

Shown in this post is the black and white published version of my drawing and the original color version. at some time in the near future I really should do a Spitzer drawing, his downfall is just begging to be lampooned.

David Patterson original color illustration