Prepared by Diane Lowman, Westport Poet Laureate and Westport Arts Advisory Committee member. 	   

Welcome back to the Westport Local Press’s Westport Arts Advisory Committee’s “Culture Corner.” Each month, the WAAC will scour our 33.45 square miles and highlight one of the many artists – visual, written, performance, and other – who call Westport home. These artists create a spectrum of color that shines over town like the rainbows often seen over the Saugatuck, so we have made “color” our theme. 

This month, we focus on mahogany, to conjure armchairs and books bound in aromatic leather on shelves of that rich-hued wood. We honor fathers everywhere in this month of June with a bit of a twist. Rather than an extant artist, we highlight two pieces from the Westport Public Art Collections that show patres familias reverence with a touch of levity. 

Curator Kathie Bennewitz shared work by two well-known cartoonists with me when I put the call out for father-centric art: Whitney Darrow Jr. and Hank Ketcham. Their respective featured cartoons, Tell Me Again, Pop and I Don’t Drink and I Don’t Gab… both capture a moment in the father child relationship that is at once humorous and universally relatable. 

Darrow produced cartoons prolifically for The New Yorker for 50 years, publishing over 1,500 between 1932 and 1982. Unlike many cartoonists, he wrote his own captions. He found inspiration in his friends and neighbors from his many years living in Wilton. This piece is part of the WSPAC: Westport Schools Permanent Art Collection (collections.westportps.org). This sketch illustrates a lovely father-son bond over storytelling. The pipe and bowtie might date the piece, but the ritual of sharing stories – repeatedly for little ones especially – is timeless. 

Ketcham created the Dennis the Menace comic strip, like Darrow, both drawing and writing it himself (from 1951-1994). Inspired to draw by one of his parents’ dinner guests, he went on to work for Walt Disney as an animator. He worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and several Donald Duck shorts. He based the strip for which he is famous on his own son, Dennis Ketcham. One day his then wife burst into his studio crying exasperatedly, “your son is a menace!” At age four, Dennis had wrecked his bedroom instead of napping; thus began the legendary comic stip. It ran in over 1,000 newspapers in 48 countries in 19 languages. This piece, too, is part of the WSPAC. This featured cartoon depicts not only the quintessential Father’s Day barbecue celebration, but the typical youngsters’ frustration with adult ways and delays. 

We here at Westport Local Press and the WAAC wish all the fathers and their offspring a happy day filled with shared activities and stories in the making. Please, also, have a look at the amazing and vast WestPAC collection – https://www.westportps.org/community/westport-public-art-collections. It, like the all our dads, is a real treasure!