Dawson - Dogs as I See Them

DOGS AS I SEE THEM

L ucy Dawsons friendly, sympathetic portraits of dogs so delighted readers of numerous English and American periodicals that they finally were gathered together to make a book.

With her sketches are her own amusing notes about the conduct of the dogs while they posed. These charming little reminiscences interpret the character and mood of each and make us friends at once with every one in this gallery of engaging portraits.

The artist herself says that it is because dogs feel and portray to the full the emotions of love, hate, fear, trust, and humor that she loves them, both as friends and as models for her pictures.

In her own words: An old dog dreaming before the fire, a dog in the perfection of its mature strength romping with a friend, either canine or human, a puppy sitting thinking of the puzzling wonderments of lifethey make the dog lover in me thrill with happiness and the artist in me itch for my drawing materials.

CONTENTS

A s I was settling down to work this morning, Scooter, our houseguest, found a good spot beside me on the sofa from which to embark on his first nap of the day. Scooter weighs six pounds and is gray and white. He has a tail like a cheerleaders prop and a left ear that stands up when he means to express interest. Hes never been sufficiently interested in anything that Ive seen to rally the energy of his right ear. He is less like a dog and more like some mysterious animal one might glimpse in the jungles of Papau, New Guinea, an animal about which one might say, It almost looked like a dog! He is capable of both great energy and great stillness, and that, along with the fact that he neither sheds nor barks, makes him excellent company. Scooter was invited for an extended visit because he is a friend of our dog, Sparky. Their friendship came about because Scooter and Sparky resemble one another. The first time the two dogs met and ran in tearing circles through my house, I couldnt tell where one left off and the other began. They made a blur of a single creature, something Odysseus might have encountered had he pressed on to one more island: an eight-legged, four-eared, two-tailed beast. Certainly their temperaments were similar. They are sweet-natured dogs, both quick to relinquish a toy or a bone to the other, both quick to roll themselves into small balls and squeeze into the space between my lower back and the sofa cushiontiny, breathing lumbar supports.

Except now that Scooter has been with us awhile I can see that theyre very different beings. Sparky outweighs his guest by nine pounds. Hes younger, eats less, and walks slower. He isnt Scooters match in jumping, but Sparky can sit up like a squirrel, perfectly balanced, for up to ten minutes at a time. Because Sparky is my dog and I am his person, I tell myself that I know what hes thinking, whereas Scooter, dark-eyed and silent, is inscrutable.

We met Scooter because I own a bookstore. Scooters owner, a magician named Ben Whiting, saw a picture of Sparky on our stores Web site and noted the very apparent similarities between our two dogs. Since Sparky came from the Humane Association of Nashville, and Scooter was found shivering in an alley behind a theater in Des Moines, both of us had wondered what these dogs, who looked like no one except each another, might be. Pictures were exchanged and soon a friendship ensued. When Ben and his wife, Erin, were planning to be out of the country for three weeks, I suggested that Scooter could stay with us.

I was explaining all of this to my neighbor Whitney and her four-year-old daughter, Wynn, when they came by for a visit. They wanted to know how Id managed to find a dog who looked so much like Sparky. Scooters dad is a magician, I said to Wynn. He performs magic every day on a cruise ship going to New Zealand. Scooter is staying with us while his dad is working.

Whitney looked at her daughter with great seriousness. Remember that, she said. Thats one theyll never tell you about in school: You could grow up to be a magician performing on a cruise ship. You could go to New Zealand.

When I was growing up, people didnt tell little girls in Catholic school that they could write novels for a living, but I suppose it wasnt such a feat of reasoning that I figured it out. Novels had to be written by someone so it might as well have been me. Still, I didnt know that I could work as a magician on a cruise ship. As much as I may have contemplated the possibilities of my life, I never could have put that one together. I also never figured that drawing soulful portraits of dogs could be a means of gainful employment.

Ive been very happy as a writer and would say that until this point Ive never thought of anything I would have rather done with my life, but now thats changed: I would rather have made my living drawing dogs. I would rather people drop off a terrier in the morning, or a spaniel, or some unidentifiable mix, and let me spend the day considering the dogs particular virtues.

Of course, to make a living from drawing one would need to be as good as Lucy Dawson, and from what Ive seen of dog portraiture, no one ever has been, not before her or since. The subjects of Dogs As I See Them (a book that has been shamefully out of print for more than fifty years and is hereby resurrected) are as timeless and relevant today as they were when Dawson drew them in England in the 1930s. Because while telephones have been improved and travel has been improved, dogs have not been improved. Dogs were perfect to begin with and so have been spared mans insistent impulse to modernize. Throughout the course of history, other artists, more famous artists, have done portraits of dogs, or dogs walked through the larger tableaus of their paintings, but it always seemed the artists purpose for the dog was to render him meticulously or artfully rather than to bring him to life. The dogs of Albrecht Drer seem to have been cobbled together from various pieces of dogs and lions and machinery. Those painted dogs never speak to me of all the things the living dog beside me on the sofa speaks of so clearly: energy, rest, loyalty, and compassion.

Lucy Dawsons geniusand I cant imagine how such a thing is doneis her ability to draw the personality of every dog she met. With no fanfare, no wallpaper or sofa cushions or forest backdrops to set the mood, she captured the central part of each dogs beingCreenagh and Joan and Bobkind and shy, impatient and generous. Lucy Dawson, who often signed her drawings as Mac, saw the best in all of them. There is such a spareness in these works, as if every mark on the page was meant to show nothing more than who the dog was, and once that was established she lifted her pencil and stopped. Of course the dogs themselves must have added a great deal of immediacy to the situation, because even the oldest and sleepiest of dogs isnt going to sit still forever. In the case of Binkie, the first dog in the book, you can see he was going to give her his time in seconds, not minutes. His desire to run after a ball all but vibrates on the page.