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Before I started painting seriously in the early 2000s, I would amuse myself and others with random cartoons and caricatures. Caricaturing is a fascinating and rarely honored sidebar to this so called fine art gig. I enjoy seeing how various editorial cartoonists capture public figures; how ten different versions of a politician are completely different in execution yet each is clearly the person being lampooned. 

I haven't caricatured anybody in well over a decade, but the recent retirement of a thirty year employee offered the opportunity. Some people are easier to get than others, and it took me a lot of crumpled paper to go through the no resemblance phase to the sorta looks like her phase to get to the yep that's her point. After that, for a gag I went with an insurance company commercial parody. I don't sell insurance; rather, Danna, the retiree, certainly knows a thing or two because she's seen a thing or two. I probably shouldn't say that because it's trademarked or copyrighted or whatever but, hey, we caricaturists like to live dangerously.

Anybody who paints develops a barometer to gauge feedback. We can separate the polite praise from the more robust appreciation. With caricaturing this somehow gets amplified. For example, I sent the Danna caricature on a journey throughout the office so people could sign the matting before it got framed. At one point a coworker (I'll call her "Olivia") came striding down the hall to a dramatic stop at my cubicle to announce "THAT is beyond awesome!" I went with coy - "Yeah, hopefully she'll get a good laugh out of it." Olivia impatiently shook her head, waved me off with a none of that hand gesture, burned a laser eye at me so I would get the point, said again "it is BEYOND awesome," then beelined back down the hall because, well, she's a beeliner.

Two further events sealed the deal. First, at the retirement party Danna's mother sought me out to tell me she loved the image of her daughter. The second is that at one point from across the room I saw Danna talking to somebody with the cartoon next to her and actually said out loud "Wow, it really looks like her." The person I had been chit-chatting with gave me a funny look. "Well...Yeah."

I'll leave you to ponder one of life's great mysteries. Why do so many caricaturists, myself included, always fall back on that giant head, small body bobblehead look?