Sasha and Sperry Are Gone

Sasha Davidson was a freelance art director who lived with his partner, writer Ralph Sperry, on Langdon Steet, just off Islington. Sperry had been ill with cancer for a long time and died a year ago on April 6th, 2007. Sasha, who also lost his father this past winter, died suddenly of the flu on March 18th. They had been minor characters around Portsmouth since the late 1970s at least and I'd guess they were about 60 or 65 years old when they died.

The two of them were avid collectors of art and antiques and oddites, and their taste in food and drink was just as exotic. Every visit or dinner made you feel like you had washed up at some time-passed-by sahib's club in a forgotten third world colonial outpost. They'd traveled to Brazil and the Seychelles (and probably much more that I don't know of), and Sasha had a business renting Jamaican vacation properties. Their home and menus and conversations were peppered with tidbits from far-away places. Their house was dark and mysterious, dense with exotic furniture, huge potted ferns blocking half the light, Art Nouveau and Deco accessories at every turn. Big original Pearlstein nudes on the walls. A full set of Manhattan glass, ashtrays from the Normandy, some bizarre little dolls from who knows where (but I wouldn't have been surprised to have seen pins sticking out of them). A pristine set of those cocktail tumblers whose female figures lost their clothes when filled with liquid. They had hundreds of glass Xmas ornaments -- three Xmas trees' worth -- that they would proudly show off each holiday season. Their backyard garden was just as beautifully exotic: a small stone terrace surrounded by dozens of rare hosta, all closed off from the outside world by towering dense greenery.

I met Sasha shortly after I moved here in 1980. At the time I was at 159 Middle with several housemates, (and Sasha and Sperry, as it turned out, lived across the street then). Sasha and Dan Fickett had an ad agency, The Penhallow Group, at the corner of Penhallow and Daniel Streets. Tom Walsh and some others worked there, too, and were maybe partners, I don't recall. Anyway, I walked in, a totally naive kid with a shiny new portfolio. They were nice enough to look it over, and they all were generous with advice and encouragement for years afterward.

One of my earlier pen and ink drawings was of their building in fact. Here it is. (I included this one in the 1987 Portsmouth History Calendar.)



In the late 1970s, Sasha had helped Marjan Frank design the Cafe Petronella, which became a hangout for the oh-so-hip in the early 1980s. Here is a drawing I did of that place, and it was in the same calendar, too.



Sperry became locally minorly famous for his 1981 science fiction novel Status Quotient: The Carrier, and worked for years at Winebaum's News. He wrote columns for local papers, and made a habit of collecting all sorts of items he found on the sidewalks while walking around town.

I can't say that I knew them well, but we kept in touch every few months with a phone call or visit. I'm not really the right guy to write a proper history of those two -- they have friends who were closer and knew them better -- but they were an important part of my life and they gave this town some character and I'm sorry they are gone.

re:Ports. Magazine

In late 1980 or early 1981, when I was living at 159 Middle Street (here is another post about interesting goings-on there), Phillip Augusta and I began working up ideas for what, after a few trial starts, became re:Ports. Arts and Entertainment Magazine. We began on the dining room table at 159 Middle Street, then got an office at 10 Commercial Alley, then a bigger office on State Street. We published every week for four years and sold it to a publishing company in Dover. Phillip and I took turns as editor and art director: for a month or two he was one and I the other, then we'd switch off. Hardest work I ever did but great fun.

The image above is a cover of the magazine, featuring a panel from one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books. The two guys who invented the series lived in Dover, and one day one of them, either Eastman or Laird, I don't remember which, walked into the re:Ports. office when I was art director and whipped out some art and said, "Hey we do this comic you want to use any of it in your magazine?" I remember the art was fabulous and I could have picked any of a number of great images. So that's where this cover came from. They gave us signed copies of their first comic, and if I had known it was going soon be worth a bazillion bucks I wouldn't have let spraymount get all over it. I don't know what happened to Eastman and Laird, except that TMNTs took off and I hope they are living happily ever after.

Kongress Street

This was one of the earliest drawings I did of Portsmouth, in 1979 or 1980, as maybe you can tell by that car in the foreground. Heck, it was one of my earliest big pen and ink drawings. I was selling prints of it locally, but it was never a big hit.

In about 1982 or so, while I was publishing re:Ports. Magazine (with Phillip Augusta), just for fun I did a quick sketch for the cover with King Kong up there. I shamelessly cribbed him from an old movie poster, and added an FB-111 in his grasp, because at the time people were talking about closing the local Pease Air Force base, (out of which flew FB-111s) and re:Ports. was a weekly that had commentary on local events. See this illustration I did of Pease's entrance.

The magazine cover was a big hit so I did a proper drawing and made a print and it sold very well. For the print I put a female figure into his hand, instead of the airplane, figuring it would have more general appeal. This print was the first of my Famous Monsters of Portsmouth series, which includes the Piscatasquid and a giant lobster attacking Wentworth-by-the-Sea. Those prints have been hanging in Ceres Bakery -- yes, in the bathrooms, but hey -- since the mid-1980's. Which gives me some kind of claim on the longest running art show in town. See all three of them at my website here.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Here's the image from a card I sent out for Valentine's Day 2007. Yeah, I know it's not Valentine's Day today; I just ran across this in my files and decided to put it up here. And the repair-guy-on-the-steeple subject goes with the previous post.

As of right now, the North Church steeple is bright and white and clean-looking. But a couple years ago it was in serious need of repair and paint. The rust and stains and peeling paint gave the thing some interesting character. But cleanliness is next to godliness. Is the purpose of the steeple to point the way to heaven? Or maybe it's a kind of lightning rod for spiritual energy, drawing down holiness into the church. Other, non-Christian religions have steeples too, right? Mosques have minarets. So maybe steeples/minarets are a human thing, rather than a Christian thing.

New Year's Card 2008

I sent this image out as a New Year's Card for 2008: "Time to take down the lights." I did the pen and ink drawing about 15 years ago or so when the steeple was being worked on.

New Hampshire Colonial State House

The old State House used to stand in the middle of Market Square, twenty or thirty feet in front of the front of the North Church. In this view, the church really would have been visible just to the left of the State House, and would have blocked some of the view of it. The State House was built in the 1750s and 1760s, and removed in 1836. About one-third of it is now in numbered pieces somewhere, being preserved with hopes that the structure can be eventually rebuilt. A good reference for more information on the State House (and indeed for Portsmouth architectural history in general) is Richard Candee's book "Building Portsmouth" (Portsmouth Advocates, 1992).

In 1988, Paul Gosselin, who is a principal of Salmon Falls Architecture and for whom I do the occasional rendering of proposed designs, approached me about drawing what the old State House used to look like. He had been Portsmouth's architectural historian, or something like that, and was working with Jim Garvin, architectural historian for New Hampshire, to try to get the thing rebuilt. Paul studied the remains of the building and drew up some plans and gave them to me and I drew up the building.

I did the drawing with black Prismacolor pencil on tracing vellum. As I look at it now, I am strongly underwhelmed by those midget elm trees, looking here an awful lot like mutant brocolli stalks. Stately American elms were once common along the streets of Portsmouth and New England in general, and would have been much taller than the ones I showed here. We used to have a line of them in front of my house where I grew up in Hampton, NH. Elms are typical features of drawings, paintings and photos of historic New England, but are now largely gone due to Dutch Elm disease. I am proud of how the horse and cart look in front of the Athenaeum, and the way the sky works. I recall having to do a bit of research to try to get the clothes on the figures approximately correct, and to understand what a typical horse cart of the times would have looked like.

Back when I first did this drawing, Paul Gosselin and his restoration group were unsure about the cupola on the top. Their best guess at the time was that it would have been similar to the one on Boston's Old State House, so that's what I drew in. We decided to leave it a bit dim and faded, however, thinking that such a tactic might indicate our uncertainty about its form. Here is what that original drawing looked like:


A couple years ago, in 2004, Nancy Carmer, who worked for the city of Portsmouth, called and said she wanted to use this image for a plaque that was going to be put up in Market Square. But, she said, the design of the cupola had been further researched (I am not sure exactly by whom) and so I changed the drawing to reflect the new design. You can now go to Market Square and see the plaque. Look Look here in the Portsmouth Herald for an article about the plaque's dedication. If you are interested in seeing more of the old State House, there is a recent wooden model of the building, very nicely built and detailed, that was in City Hall a couple years ago. It might be there still.

Pease Air Force Base Entrance

Editor Dan Wise asked me to do the cover illustration for Business New Hampshire magazine's July 1989 issue on Pease's makeover from a SAC base to a industrial/office park. It's done with markers and colored pencils, a style I use for architectural renderings (see this page of my website for more in that technique). This style has been made very popular by Michael Doyle's book "Color Drawing", which is recommended for anyone who wants to learn a very accessible rendering technique.

Pease's entrance was far more interesting when it was an air base than afterwards. This drawing shows the handsome little guard house that was there, and also one of several airplanes that were parked, museum fashion, out on the lawn. A rather sinister reference to the purpose of the place was visible in the mushroom cloud insignia for one of the military units stationed there (just barely visible on the sign in this drawing). Here you can see a much better view of that insignia and also photos of Pease's military history. Here is more history on a page which also includes a bomb's eye view of the base from about two miles up.

Atkinson Street, Strawbery Banke, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Here's the view looking northwest up Atkinson Street, from Strawbery Banke out to State Street way in the distance. Those two tiny figures in the distance are about in the spot from which my drawing of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich house was made. This drawing is done in broad-stroke pencil, a style popular among architects in the early 1900's and popularized in drawing technique books by Ernest Watson and Ted Kautsky (both excellent and highly recommended). You sharpen your pencils to a wide, flat point, and lay down a single layer of graphite. Broad stroke purists insist that you should never go back over a mark once you have made it, and that you always use the same pressure on the pencil, varying the darkness of the mark by using a different grade pencil, not by pressing harder. (Limited edition prints of this image are available directly from me.)

In the left center of this view is the William Pitt Tavern, site of interesting goings-on during the time of the Revolutionary War, and which Strawbery Banke has restored. It is also part of Portsmouth's Black Heritage Trail. Strawbery Banke Museum is one of the cultural institutions that makes Portsmouth a great town. It is very popular among tourists and school field trips, but somewhat less so, I would say, among the local citizenry, who, IMHO, seem to take it for granted.