Sunday Mailbag

Q: Do you have your work displayed throughout you home, or has your family tried to limit it to just certain areas?

A: That’s an interesting question… what kind of art hangs in the home of an artist?

There’s an old adage that goes “a plumber’s home always has leaky pipes” or “a carpenter’s home always has crooked doors”, meaning that when you do something for a living your house is the last place that same work gets done in. That is certainly true with me, as I have almost none of my own artwork on the walls of our home. I did a pencil portrait of The Lovely Anna and I for our wedding invitation and that original is in our dining room and I did a small watercolor painting of a landscape that is next to our front door. That’s it for my own artwork on the walls of the house anywhere other than the basement. There the original of the Wizard of Oz painting I did for the book Memories of a Munchkin hangs with a print of one of the posters of the Minnesota Twins team I did that has some player autographs on it.

My studio is the place where the cartoon art hangs, including some of my own stuff. Of course I have the original caricatures of me by Mort Drucker, Al Hirschfeld and Sebastian Krüger. I also have several prints of MAD splashes I did with signatures from the cast members on them. I’ve written about them under the topic “The Wall of Shame” before but here is the collection:

Three MAD prints above my drawing board

Two more in the corner…

Click any for a closer look:

Signed by the cast of “Heroes” and creator Tim Kring

Signed by Rachel Bilson and Adrian Brody of the cast of “The O.C.”

Signed by the entire cast of “LOST” (!!!)

Signed by the cast of “Two and a Half Men”

Signed by the cast of “The Sopranos” (sorry, no close up on this one)

I’ve still got to get this new one to the frame shop…

The Big Bomb Theory!!

All great fun, but delegated to the studio. The wall just outside of the studio is the future home of all the cartoon art I’ve collected from other cartoonists, including Stephen Pastis, John Hambrock, Chris Browne, Dave Carpenter, Mort Drucker, Sam Viviano, Jeff Koterba, Sandra Boynton, Jim Scancarelli, Chris Houghton and several others… just gotta get the frame shop working on a few more of them them.

Upstairs is a different story. The Lovely Anna likes Monet, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Degas a little more than she likes goofy cartoon illustration, so we have a lot of their prints on the walls in the main living areas. She also is a big fan of painter Thomas Arvid, who does realistic oils paintings of wine glasses, bottles and other related stuff. We have several glicees and artist’s proofs of his work in our living room.

Thanks to Ed Placencia for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!