Rex, The Master of Line and Whimsy

My dad, Robert C. Winsett, died nearly 20 years ago, summer of 1998. He was an artist and I have just had all his art packed away. He was really prolific so I had a lot packed up high, down low, on shelves and on the floor, scattered here and there in the garage. A few months ago I decided to reorganize it all and put it in plastic boxes to protect it better. It’s very odd for me to look at my dad’s art now. As I was sorting through it, I really wondered why I was keeping it. We have art throughout our house done by my wife and I, by my wife’s mother and stepfather, by my sister, and a few pieces of my dad’s. But we don’t display one in fifty of his drawings. I considered throwing it away but couldn’t bring myself to do that, so I settled for just organizing and storing. But as I went through them I found an odd affinity developing. Shortly after I finished sorting all of his art,  my wife decided to do this blog and asked me to write about and share some of my dad’s work. As I considered writing this first post about my dad’s art, I realized I knew nothing about his art.  I mean, I knew nothing of his relationship to his art or his experience of creating it, or what meaning, if any, he gave to it. We never talked about art in even general terms. Our house had many art books that I was always looking through as a kid but my dad and I never talked about art even in that general sense. Now, so many years later looking at some of his work I began to muse about what I was seeing and ask myself, for the first time, what did he have in mind when he did this? Now, I give it meaning based on my own experience and my somewhat hazy memory of him. Even selecting which piece to display in this first post became a dilemma. How could I introduce someone whose take on the world was masterfully minimalist and ironically whimsical. He did art with a pen, black ink and paper. On rare occasions he would include a splash of a single color, but only if it served his design sense. He was first and foremost a graphic artist who could draw or paint anything he wanted – yet challenged himself by imposing strict limits on himself. I chose the drawing he titled Rex as the first to post because of the power of his lines, the complete structural comprehension of his model and his keen observation of life. Even the greatest are brought low by time and the predation of the weak in greater numbers. I am stunned that he could reveal this fundamental process so precisely and so simply.