I saw some of his originals in an exhibition in Newark (of all places). They confirm what I’d heard — he just sat down and drew, like he was inking pencils that nobody else could see. Robert McKimson was like that too, as an animator. Once, the paper he was at was wanting a picture of a new piece of equipment that the fire department had, and didn’t have one, but McCay had seen the thing on his way in to the office, and sat down and drew it from the memory of one look, and it was probably as accurate as a mechanical drawing.
The Nemo pages hanging on the walls in the art gallery were clean, showing no pencil marks unerased (which suggests there may not have been any to begin with), and the only sign of hesitation or correction came from white paint used to cover what was an apparent ink bottle spill on one of the pages.
He did political cartoons for Hearst for years — huge, visionary artworks depicting the publisher’s banal brainstorms. A real waste of a fine artist, even though some of them are breathtaking.
I saw some of his originals in an exhibition in Newark (of all places). They confirm what I’d heard — he just sat down and drew, like he was inking pencils that nobody else could see. Robert McKimson was like that too, as an animator. Once, the paper he was at was wanting a picture of a new piece of equipment that the fire department had, and didn’t have one, but McCay had seen the thing on his way in to the office, and sat down and drew it from the memory of one look, and it was probably as accurate as a mechanical drawing.
The Nemo pages hanging on the walls in the art gallery were clean, showing no pencil marks unerased (which suggests there may not have been any to begin with), and the only sign of hesitation or correction came from white paint used to cover what was an apparent ink bottle spill on one of the pages.
He did political cartoons for Hearst for years — huge, visionary artworks depicting the publisher’s banal brainstorms. A real waste of a fine artist, even though some of them are breathtaking.