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| Kareoke Night at Mystic Ice Cream, Fruitland Park. Watercolor, pen & ink on paper (9"x12") |
Fun after graduation means enjoying the company of my good friend Thomas Thorspecken and sketching karaoke night at Mystic Ice Cream. There was much humming, daring to sing, laughter and delicious ice cream. YUM!
I met Thomas thirty years ago while working at the Walt Disney Feature Animation Studio in Florida (WDFAF), when he joined the Lion King's crew as a character animation artist. He was a recent graduate of the animation internship program that basically staffed the recently established Orlando studio with eager, bright eyed and bushy-tail new talent from top national and international programs. Like me, Thomas attended art school in NYC. I completed the same internship the season prior and was now part of the special effects crew. Although we worked in different departments, we ran into each other at dailies, the weekly life drawing sessions we both attended religiously, and social events such as the studio's awesome Halloween costume contest, ice cream socials and wrap parties. I have always considered him to be one of my Disney Studio family friends. I was already in Los Angeles when the Florida studio closed in 2002, so I never knew what happened to everyone I admired and had the privilege to work with at WDFAF. However by 2016, I was back in my beautiful Florida, getting used to life as a recent divorcee. It was then that we had a studio reunion and I was able to catch up with a large number of friends I had not seen for more than two decades, Thomas included. I found that he was still living in Orlando and was going through similar growing pains stemming from his own divorce. Seeing my Disney Studio family at this crucial time not only helped me forget temporarily about the breakage of my family, but also inspired a sense of belonging that I missed a great deal. I felt surrounded by sheer happiness and people who knew who I was before I met my former husband. People who knew how hard I had work to be there, who respected and appreciated me. Since then, I renewed friendships via facebook and other social media outlets bringing myself up to speed and keeping abreast of their successes and life chances, such as Thomas' publishing of his first book Urban Sketching: The Complete Guide to Techniques (2014).
I invited Thomas to midterm review of the fall semester in my third (and last) year of grad school at UCF. In his website, Analog Artist Digital World he shares a drawing and a story each day for the last sixteen years, often featuring cultural events around town, so I thought this would be a great opportunity for both the graduate program and Thomas. Well... it turned out to be an amazing opportunity for me too because Thomas continued to show up to many of my events at UCF. He was there for the Spring's Midterm Critique, my Thesis Defense, my Last Final and Graduation, to name a few. He helped me make grass paper for my final piece, recorded me prepping materials for a class, accompanied me to this year's Earth Day celebration dance and even sketched my sister's wedding proposal. Thomas was a key figure in the making of my largest installation, titled The Cathedral: Within and Without, as I nursed a recent shoulder injury at the time. This work would have been impossible without his assistance, following through to the breakdown of it after my grad show.
In the last few months, Thomas and I have become good friends who reminisce about our common past and speak candidly about our present as artists, divorcees and dreamers. As I write this article, I am painfully aware that my time with my friend is coming to an end, as he readies himself to move back to NY state, to set roots in our former home state. After three decades of living in the same area, I can’t blame him for wanting a change. I am concerned by the fridgid winters he will have to face but I am excited about the possibilities in front of him, while I prepare myself for the void his move out of state will create. That is indeed what good friends do: They fill your life while they are in it.
So, here I am. Enjoying ice cream and Karaoke night with my good friend Thomas.
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| On Location |
