Paul Bunyan had his myth and artist Larry Estes has his. When Larry found himself without a studio, he decided to take things in his own hands and mounted a makeshift drawing board next to his workstation on the assembly-line at work. In-between assembling doors on the line, he started developing his fast-paced drawing style that later won awards from museum curators and the Director of Harvard Art Museums, who selected Larry for the Outstanding Drawing Prize.
Larry’s art journey that began in the factory eventually lead to something magical. When looked at as a whole, Larry’s body of work reveals a startling find – the various series within his magnum opus compose an over-all composition complete with symmetry. This has been a hard point for Larry to present on flat paper, so he has resorted to using film to show the incredible composition, and he has launched a Kickstarter project to bring his story to the world so they can be encouraged to continue their dream and discover the magical composition of their own journey. How many artist’s have missed the beauty of their own greatest work – their magnum opus – because they didn’t look at their work as a piece of art. The link is: www.kickstarter.com
It was only years later that Larry discovered that his journey had a composition. He found similar patterns in the ancient patterns found in the Hero’s Myth as outlined by comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell.
The drawings paint a classic story of the struggling artist fighting to salvage a dream in an environment – the assembly-line – that is usually the antithesis to a nurturing setting for dreams. At the times, the artist even pens his own encouragement on some of his drawings, exclaiming positive words like, “Get Up! You can Win,” and “The world is your oyster,” etc. But the most enduring drawing was of a ship headed his way – this was Larry‘s ship coming in.
