After a ton of drama in California during the 2000's, I wound up fully homeless, after several hard years working as a taxi driver. My family had offered to fly me to North Carolina, where both my parents and my sister's family wound up living. We were originally from Ohio, I had no other ties to NC, and it was pretty much about the last place in the world I wanted to move to.
After almost a full year on the streets of L.A. and Orange counties, nearly every place I panhandled to survive, and every attempt to make a living again, was shut down by a massive, behind-the-scenes effort by police and whomever. Running out of options, I finally accepted the flight to NC from the family. The plan at the time was to stay for a couple of months, get my bearing again, and head back to California. That didn't happen. I landed in Raleigh in mid-November of 2008, as the economy was in full collapse mode in the Great Recession. The family drove me back to the Greensboro area.
I couldn't find
any job, there were few to be had by anyone at that point, much less a weird California guy.
So for Christmas that year, I drew my niece and nephew's names, in their favorite colors, as I mentioned before. During my whole miserable decade in North Carolina, I couldn't find ANY job, except taxi driving in Winston-Salem for a year. Being perpetually broke (and depressed largely because of that and no one to talk to), I drew pictures for Katherine and Ethan for birthdays and Christmas as they grew up. When I stepped up my drawing game and started drawing people in 2015, I drew Katherine Justin Bieber, and Ethan Red Sox player Dustin Pedroia, for Christmas. The top picture is the kids holding up their drawings. The photo below is them hitting each other in the head with the poster tubes, as my sister Cheri looks on. Kids.
Before I got to that point, I drew this picture of Ethan, below, a huge baseball fan and really good player. This was based on a photo he got in the Kernersville newspaper. This was really early in my attempts to draw people.
Katherine was fully into competitive cheerleading, which is a crazy sport. Yes, I shot video of several contests for her team,
it's a sport, and a dangerous one at that. It's amazing what those girls, and a few guys, do, throwing the flyers all over the place, and all. The drawing above is one I did for Katherine when she joined high school cheer, making the varsity squad as a freshman. These were early drawings of people, I didn't have great photos to work from, and they aren't the best. But like all the rest, they were part of the learning process.
This is one of the oldest drawings in this whole series of blog posts. I lost pretty much everything from 2005 to 2009, and didn't have a camera to take photos. I did this as a humorous, 8 1/2" X 11" Christmas card kind of thing in 2008, right after landing in North Carolina. It's a night time silhouette of Frosty the snowman, pounding beers, under the moonlight. The caption says, "Sometimes, late at night, when the children were all in asleep, Frosty would polish off a 12-pack." My dad thought it was funny, and he sent a few copies to friends and family members.
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