Napkin People - Jacqueline Jacob

As I searched for a caricature, I found a great deal of funny and clever drawings but none of them seemed to spark any real questions or thoughts that made them different from any of the others. I decided to go a different route and pick a drawing that captured my attention from when I was a little girl, my Grandpa's Napkin people. These drawings were always a high interest of mine, because I never really understood why he made them, or whom he was making them for. I guess what makes these drawings so unique, is the fact that he just makes up these characters out of nowhere. As I talked to him on the phone this afternoon he was so thrilled to hear that someone actually found what he did interesting. He later explained that it all depends on the type of napkin and what kind of pens he had lying around in his pockets. Which makes perfect sense, seeing that when an artist goes to make there work it all depends on materials. He explained that not each napkin is flat some have a texture or pattern throughout them creating different ways to manipulate the pen and the ink laid down upon it. In the drawing titled Wade you see this type of texture and how it plays along with the wonky lines throughout the characters hair and mustache. But in the bottom two images he uses just simple lines to create an image that the brain recognizes being a human-like form. Within these few drawings I begin to process a story of who they could possibly of been in a story plot. It brings me back to the essay we had to read, Hugh Blair Lecture XVI. As the article describes each type of man, the Boor, ironical, flatter, I began to connect these descriptions to the individual characters that he drew. They describe a spread of different personalities and when I look at the drawings I begin to see these types of figures form into these characters. The amount of personality put into each character allows the mind to travel and question what was about to happen or what had happened in the story your mind begins to create. As I look at the drawing of St. Patrick he looks like a character that would have a similar description to being the ironical. He is this little quirky figure that looks like he would be the type to “go up to his enemies and volunteers to chat with them instead of showing hatred.” These are just a few of the many hundreds of napkin drawings my Grandfather has created over the years. Each one is unique in its own way and allows the mind to explore through an every day item most take for granted, the napkin.