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Serious Artists Can Draw Crowds, Too: Cover Artist Roy Robinson
by Jamey Landry
Roy Robinson will capture your soul if you let him. Okay, maybe that’s stretching it too far, but, if you let him, he will capture your self as others see it—in caricature.
As a caricature artist since about 1943, Roy has had the opportunity to study untold thousands of willing and perhaps unsuspecting subjects throughout his career. The key to his success as a caricaturist: never break the cardinal rule, which, according to Roy, is, “Never be mean spirited in your drawings of people. It gets around and it’s death for a caricature artist.” Not to worry, though. Roy is as kind and thoughtful a person as you would want to see.
But how did this caricature artist become a watercolor painter? It’s a rather circuitous story, but a good one.
Just after the start of World War II, Roy lived in Los Angles, where he was employed at North American Aviation, an aircraft factory. They made an airplane called the P-51 Mustang, probably the best piston-engine fighter aircraft ever produced, as well as the B-25 Mitchell bomber, a fast twin-engine medium bomber that was used against Tokyo a few months after Pearl Harbor. Roy’s job was to build the spinners on the nose of the P-51, which is a streamlined covering that conceals the mechanisms that attach the propeller to the engine. “I had to spot weld the aluminum pieces that formed the spinner, and it threw sparks everywhere!” Roy chuckles as he recalls the story. “The spot welder would actually melt the aluminum to fuse it together, and it would drip down onto my overalls. My arms would be armored from the dripping aluminum!”
Life at that factory during the biggest war in history was busy, to say the least. But in spite of the fact that Roy was doing a fine job building those spinners as fast as the factory could build the rest of the airplane, he says that his dear old Uncle Sam decided that Roy was not really cut out for that factory life. “I got called up to serve.” Roy laughs as he recalls how he was drafted into the Army Air Corps. While in the Air Corps, Roy discovered that his talent for drawing was valuable to the war effort. Many of his cartoons appeared in Yank magazine, an inter-service publication by the then War Department that was designed to boost the morale of the troops.
After Roy’s discharge from the Army, he accepted a job as a graphic designer for the combined state and city health department in New Orleans. Soon after he moved his wife and two small children to the area, Governor Earl Long cut the department out of the state budget. Dazed but undaunted, Roy landed a job as an instructor of art at Newcomb College. He taught art there for two years, which he fondly remembers as one of the most satisfying times of his career.
While at Newcomb in 1951, Roy became involved with “Tulane Close-up,” a program produced for Tulane University at WDSU for that new-fangled thing called “television.” Tulane had Roy do the art direction for the show, which meant that he did the art cards that appeared on screen between segments and commercials, as well as the set design.
WDSU, the first TV station in the city and in the state, was one of fewer than 100 TV stations in the country. At that time, TV was done mostly live instead of taped. Roy worked for three years on the Tulane show and others. A WDSU co-worker named Dick Van Dyke—the funny guy from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”—had a show where he would draw famous people by drawing a few squiggles and adding a line at a time as a studio audience tried to guess who Van Dyke was drawing. When Hollywood called in the mid-1950s, Mr. Van Dyke answered, and WDSU asked Roy to take his place as the cartoonist.
After a few years, drawing live on TV ran its course. Roy went to work as a designer for a local advertising agency. He held that job for more than thirty years, designing everything from matchbook covers to logos for the City of New Orleans and everything in between. Throughout it all, Roy continued to practice his caricature art, which he applied to his as job, as well. His experience helped him to create such lovable characters as the Speedee Oil Change mascot, a happy little oil can on wheels with a funnel hat. When the ad agency closed their doors in the mid- 1980s, Roy retired from advertising, but not from drawing. Capitalizing on the burgeoning tourist and convention business spawned by the 1984 World’s Fair, Roy began drawing caricatures of people at conventions, parties, shopping malls—almost anywhere he was paid to appear.
During his many years working in commercial art and as a caricaturist, Roy had been repeatedly asked, “Do you do any serious work?” So he finally decided to “get serious.” He began to experiment in earnest with other media—oil paints, acrylics, and pastels. He even studied with some of the heavy hitters in the art world like John McCready and Frank Webb. But it was watercolors that finally captured Roy’s imagination.
Although lovely to look at for its inherent delicate nature, watercolor best suits Roy because of his style. Always the drawing artist, part of Roy’s technique is to draw a scene on his paper, ink it in, then apply the watercolor to it in a technique he calls “transparent watercolor.” Each layer of color is carefully added to the painting until the look Roy is trying to get is achieved. He says, “It’s pretty exciting to work with watercolor. You are constantly on the edge because watercolor is so unforgiving. One mistake and your painting is done for.”
Now what advice would you suppose Roy would give to an aspiring artist hoping to have his work appear on a magazine cover? “Draw, draw, draw!” Roy laughs. And maybe have a TV career. And an advertising career. And draw funny pictures of people…
If you’d like to see more of Roy’s watercolors or have him delight your guests at your party or convention with caricatures, contact him at 893-0686 or by e-mail at mrobinson.5@juno.com.
