By coincidence, as I was looking through my political drawings, one of the people I've caricatured made the news. His Honour Richard Stewart is the mayor of Coquitlam, near where I live. For the past year and a half, he's been wearing the same slate-grey suit to work every day. He wanted to make a statement on how we perceive male and female roles in society. His idea was to wear the same clothes over and over again until someone noticed: he claims this took eighteen months.
This social experiment comes from Australia, where a news anchorwoman was chastised for wearing the same outfit on-air two days in a row. Her partner then wore the same suit for a month, but nobody noticed. Obviously, a double-standard exists in the minds of television viewers.
I drew this caricature of Mayor Stewart a year and a half ago (but I updated it for today's JSVB post!). He must have just gotten started on his project at that time. In order to make the drawing look like him, I grabbed several reference pictures from the Internet. He was wearing the grey suit and I sampled the colour digitally to make the drawing.
I only have two suits, one black and one white. I hardly ever wear them, though. I doubt anyone would notice one way or another. I also recall a friend I had in school we all called "Grapes". He didn't resemble Don Cherry, rather, he always wore a purple shirt. One day I went over to his house and he showed me his closet, which contained twenty or thirty duplicates of the same purple clothes. His father worked for a promotional company and one day he brought home a crate of purple shirts. Grapes liked the colour, so he wore one every day. Having been through various starving artist phases, I can relate to the economy and freedom from indecision that a closet full of identical shirts would bring. Artists wear black, though, and I do have a fair amount of that in my bureau. Nobody says anything if I wear black every day, unless I get dandruff.
Mayor Stewart was pleased with his suit. It was a good colour for him to wear. I know for a fact he's not pleased with this caricature, but since he didn't pay for it, well, here we are.
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