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Grape Tootsie Pop Drawing

Mike Pitzer

United States

Drawing, Graphite on Paper

Size: 20 W x 26 H x 0 D in

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$545USD

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About The Artwork

A little background, as a kid growing up in Algonac, Michigan, we use to hop on our bikes and ride along M29 searching for pop and beer bottles people had thrown from their car windows. I guess there weren't littering laws back then, anyways, each bottle was worth two cents. We'd find as many as we could. Bring 'em home and wash 'em out with the garden hose. Then take the 10 or 12 we'd found up to the Pte. Tremble Market and cash 'em in! I would always buy a Tootsie Pop for a nickel and then pocket the rest of my cash — usually about twenty cents! Thinking back on the simplicity of those days and the happiness I got from buying a nickel sucker with my own money, I just had to draw a Tootsie Pop. Since starting to draw again, I’ve now completed 5 Tootsie Pops. The grape being my 5th. It's happened a few times now, that I've run out of my large rolls of drawing paper while I have the urge to draw. This was one of those times. I went through my flat files and found some Canson Paper I'd been gifted back in 1984 by the local Canson Paper rep in Los Angeles. Except for the heavy texture, I thought it would be great to try some drawings while I waited for my paper rolls to be delivered. This led to a series of 5 Canson Paper drawings, with two featured in the 97th Annual Juried Exhibition in May of 2022.

Details & Dimensions

Drawing:Graphite on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:20 W x 26 H x 0 D in

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Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.

My drawings are highly rendered personal items that come from my childhood growing up on the St. Clair River in Algonac, Michigan. I call my work “Happy Art” because the inspiration to create each piece is simple to appreciate, easy to understand, and the work makes me -- and others, happy. Before I started drawing again, I spent 40 years of my life working in advertising, an industry I still love. Twenty of those years were spent as an international, award-winning Executive Creative Director working for some of the largest ad agencies in the country on some of the most creative accounts in the world. Much of that career was spent in vibrant, competitive, creative advertising markets like Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and Phoenix. Then, in 2010, we moved to Fresno… where for the first time in my professional career I experienced, what it’s like to have my creative soul sucked dry. That was just my experience, and as they say, “your mileage may vary.” It was awful — but here’s the amazing part; my wife, Lynn, knew how unhappy I was and, without any job offer or freelance prospects to provide income, she told me to quit. I think her exact words were, “Get the f**k out of there now! Please.” I did. That’s where this journey truly begins. Lynn encouraged me to start drawing again — something I hadn’t done in many years. My natural instinct was to pour what I was feeling emotionally into my art. My first attempts at painting captured the emotional struggle I was feeling of being trapped in darkness, yet needing to let my creativity out. But, these pieces were dark and somewhat foreboding. The issue for me was that this direction (while true) was not cathartic and was not making me happy. I’d always found drawing with a pencil to be meditative, so one day, I sat down at my desk and started drawing my Stan Smith tennis shoes. They were so beat-up, just like me. The leather was incredibly soft with some scars and scuffs, like me. And yet they still had a lot of life left in them, once again, like me. When Lynn saw what I was doing she wanted it framed and hung by our front door so that everyone coming to our home could see what her husband had drawn. That felt so great. It was like being a kid again and having a drawing put on the refrigerator for everyone to see. Then it hit me, I was feeling really happy. What to draw next? I started thinking about the things that made me happy as a child. As I drew, I put progressive drawings up on Facebook.

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