Mister Kane

Mark's best friend, Tom, is in the advertising business. They used to work together for years, and still do, now and again, Tom as the creative director, Mark as the producer. Tom has dreamt up ads you've probably seen in print and on television, for Yellowtail vodka, Steve Madden and BASF, among many others.

I wanted to post about Tom's drawings and work, seen here. You can spend hours browsing through his images. His blog showcases his beautiful pen and ink drawings, which are done in notebooks of assorted sizes - pages and pages of drawings are covered in careful script describing whatever's drawn, and the narrative is intimate and interesting. The notebook covers have stickers on them that are artfully arranged, and piles of them are left on the living room coffee table to flip through. It's a neat way to get into someone's (nicely illustrated) head.

More amazing are his paintings, seen here. Most are several feet large, and when you walk into a room with a few on the wall, the effect is startling. I haven't decided on a favorite quite yet. Right now it's between Don Knotts and a gigantic white horse that used to hang above the dining room table.

I went through brief a period when I revisited drawing, (pencil on paper, from photographs). I remember asking Tom one night about how he works, and whether he ever made mistakes - if you flip through his notebooks, you will notice that there are never any ugly pages, pages that looked just wrong or that were abandoned halfway through.

Tom explained that if he ever made a 'mistake', he'd just work around it in the drawing. Whatever he'd draw would simply take on a life of its own.

There are so many things I'd like to get back into, right now, and so little time. If anything, just looking at Tom's work inspires me toward being more creative.


A page from Tom's notebook, above. His portrait of his friend, photographer Dave Lachappelle.