Portrait artist duty at Saks Fifth Avenue
The sun was shy today, but all the people sitting for me at Saks Fifth Avenue this Saturday certainly weren’t! (Image: carolita johnson)
I had to wake up early this Saturday morning and collect my wits and brush-tipped markers. A gig at Saks Fifth Avenue awaited me, Michael Crawford, Matt Diffee, and Victoria Roberts. We were the “guest cartoonists.” There were also face-painters, bathing suit models (of which one male’s pilosity was not abnormal, but nonetheless remarkable for a model), fashion models walking around with little placards identifying the designer of the clothes on their backs, free chinese food, and a guy in a tux playing a slick white piano.
I always worry about these gigs and spend the eve of the event making a list of ideas for cartoons to draw in case the audience is apathetic. But there’s never any need to worry. People see a man or a woman at an easel, holding a marker and next thing you know they’re all waiting on line waiting for their chance to ask, “Will you do me?”
Will I do you? I sure will, big fella!
It’s futility to resist or say, “I’m not a portrait artist, I’m a cartoonist.” But I do warn every incredibly earnest-looking sitter (I believe most have no idea that we are TNY cartoonists, and simply assume we’ve been picked up off the sidewalk in Times Square for the price of a lunch) that I will be drawing them as if they were a cartoon in The New Yorker. The secret to a happy experience on both sides of the easel is to draw them as themselves, but better-looking and thinner. Of course, I might have given myself a little less work if I’d started drawing people fatter and uglier, but I’m not that prescient.
Before I knew it, I was handing drawings to beaming, gratified people, feeling like Santa Claus in some cases, or like Glinda the Good Witch in others. I did one 60 year old Russian woman named Anna Maria as Greta Garbo’s younger sister. A half a beer and a bowl of soup at Sapporo later, I came home to rest my poor dogs. I’m now watching The Portrait of Dorian Gray on channel 13, with a young Angela Lansbury singing, “Goodbye little yellowbird! I’d rather brave the cold on a leafless tree than a prisoner be in a cage of gold!”
