a million monkeys typing

Sketchbook: Laughing Japanese Man

Posted September 13th, 2005 at 11:34am

While I have nowhere near my wife’s artistic talent, some semi-recent rifling through my sketchbooks have made me think about spending a little more time with a pencil and paper again. In tripping across a lot of half-done sketches, I came across this little piece, which still makes me smile.

Laughing Japanese Man, Pencil sketch, 1997

This quick drawing of a jolly old Japanese man is from a television documentary: he could not stop laughing while being interviewed, as he talked about the strange influences of the West between mouthfuls of octopus. It was rather hastily completed from memory just a few minutes after watching this interesting program about the cultural clashes in Japan, a result of the encroachment of the “modern” Western world upon such a very traditional society.