Revisiting Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa, in a fine, hard wood, June 2018 by Tom Wills, pencil.

I will occasionally revisit the people I have previously drawn. It doesn't happen very often and the ones I can think of right off are Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Marilyn Monroe and now, Frank Zappa.  I did Miles, Duke and Frank for myself.

FZ #2 by Tom Wills, June 2018, pencil

I love Frank Zappa for his music. Gotta admit, he made me laugh a lot too. But as a composer, he was a very serious fellow -- especially in his later years, with ensembles and symphonies performing under his direction, or premiering his orchestral works all over this planet.

FZ #1, pencil sketch, October 2010,  (Revised January 2011)

In the recording studio, he was a pioneer in multitracking and digital recording plus media storage. He was among the first with film, then video. As a guitarist, he was untouchable.

"No commercial potential"

I had never gone back and changed a drawing, until I tinkered with FZ in January 2011. 
The hair bugged me, so I changed it. 
Then I changed his arms and hands. 
And nose and eyes. 
And a bit of guitar. 
Then I put him in a new frame. 

Frank was always changing and rearranging his stuff, so why not me?

"The thing I do is build things. And I have to participate in their manifestation. That’s why I had to become a band leader and a guitar player. I would have been happy to just write it and turn it over to someone else. But they don’t play it if you give it to them. I learned that when I first started to compose it."

Fast forward seven years and I've tinkered again, this time with a look at FZ in his later years, not exactly tamed but favoring crisp shirts, baggy trousers and a tie. And, still that cigarette.
This exercise also helps to illustrate how my technique has changed over the years. I work faster, but the piece is more relaxed and the detail is better.

You are what you is. You is what you am.

Two years before his 1993 death, he said this  -- which works for all of us in 2018:

One of the things that was taken out of the curriculum was civics. Civics was a class that used to be required before you could graduate from high school. You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution. And after all the student rebellions in the ’60s, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies. Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government—nobody knows what’s in it. It’s one of the best kept secrets. And so, if you don’t know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them? And furthermore, if you don’t know what is in that document, how can you care if someone is shredding it?