The Story Behind the Portrait "When I Was Pretty" - Part I

Sometimes the story that inspired the drawing is as important as the drawing itself.The story of this drawing began at the family lake house in the summer of 1963. I was 15 when my cousin came to visit. I knew her as  my older cousin, four years my senior, who thrilled over the music of Elvis, Pat Boon, and Sal Minieo. Who shrieked with false mortification when her younger cousins would sneak into her room  in one end of my grandmother's attic, to see her shrine of clippings from fan magazines of her favorite rock and roll stars. Then before I hardly knew her she was gone, married at 16.

When she came to visit at the lake house she was 19. She had been living in Philadelphia with her husband and came ahead alone to Michigan with her husband to follow later. It was about 9 a.m. when I stepped inside the cottage. I noticed movement in the upstairs loft and looked up to see my cousin, with a smile, raise her top and  reveal her breasts to me.

At 15, I was still very innocent. I was surprised and laughed, and never said anything about it, but I always remembered that moment.

After she and her husband went back home, she and I had little contact. I graduated from high school, graduated from college, got married, got drafted at 21, and was in Vietnam in 1971 when she sent me a letter.
By this time she had four children and had recently left her husband after she discovered he was leading a double life as a homosexual. In her letter, she said, "All these years I was unhappy, but I didn't know why. No one ever told me I was pretty."

I wrote her back and reminded her of the time in the lake house. To me, I said, at that moment, you were the most beautiful woman in the world. Years later, she told me she cried when she read my letter.

Now I am an artist of 62 and she is 13 times a grandmother at 67. We met recently and she was telling me that her children cannot remember and her grandchildren cannot imagine her as anyone but old and 100 pounds overweight. She asked, "Could you do a drawing of me, recapturing that moment at the lake house, when I was pretty?"

 In Part II of "When I Was Pretty", I will the discuss the process involved in creating the final drawing.