Image of the Week: Jerry Hall, He Was So Small
© Durga Yael Bernhard
Here's an etching I did way back in the late 1970s as a sample illustration for my portfolio. I was not yet twenty. Back then, a portfolio was a black thing with handles that you physically took to a publishing house or a gallery, where you would open your work on a table and show it to a human being. A first step in becoming a professional artist was to fill a portfolio with artwork, whether published or unpublished, fine art or illustration. Mine was a mix of all four.
In those days I was using the etching studio at the Art Students' League of New York on 57th Street. There was no teacher – just a monitor named Sylvie with thick hair to her waist and an even thicker French accent, who managed the acid baths and presses. This etching is printed in red ink and hand-colored with watercolors – but very little, as most of the rose-colored tones you see are a printed texture. Textured or tonal etching is created by a technique called aquatint that involves the use of special chemical rosins on a zinc plate, which is then bathed in acid to etch away the desired area. I also made the usual solid lines, using an etching needle to cut through a resin coating on the plate.
The illustration is of a traditional Cornish nursery rhyme:
Jerry Hall
he was so small
a rat could eat him
– hat and all!
Ironically, about thirty years after I created this piece, I met and fell in love with a man named Jerry, who was quite small. Poor Jerry had a touch of "Napoleon complex" due to his small stature. He did not have curly hair, however, or wear a plumed hat. Or stockings, heaven forbid. The Jerry I knew wore hunting camouflage, and carried a .44 mag.
You can find many renderings of this nursery rhyme on the web. It's an invitation to play around with proportions, and to make rats look cute. I was very much partial to profiles in that phase of my development as an artist – partly the influence of the ancient Greek vases I'd seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – the ones painted with all those lovely black profile figures. I made numerous trips to the Met (including two birthdays in a row) during my years at the Art Students' League.
A good week to all –
D Yael Bernhard