Photo: Melody Komyerov

A SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH (continued)

In high school when I read Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, I was surprised to hear the words of someone who loved the earth as much as I did. Later when I studied history and government in college, I read Thoreau’s words again. This time I understood, not just his ideas about nature but also his philosophy about how to live. If people weren’t working so hard to buy stuff, he said, they could spend more time doing what they love. That was an important idea.

I decided to spend my life doing art.

And so I have. More than thirty years ago, after we got married, my wife and I moved back to my small New Hampshire town. Here I worked for the local newspaper drawing cartoons for the letters page. Those cartoons were both funny and serious. Over the years my art became more illustration than cartoon, and it was printed in newspapers and magazines all over the United States.

Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston
for The New York Times Book Review

From the beginning my wife and I made decisions about our family’s way of life that had nothing to do with money. Artists don’t get paid a lot, so we had to think about what kind of life we wanted and not what kinds of thing we would buy. I worked at home all day drawing pictures. My children could come into the studio any time to talk or to draw. In our home there was no television, but there were library books, and we read aloud to our kids until they were almost teenagers.