The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Monday nights 7-9pm EST in New York City. Presentations vary weekly and include everything from historical topics and technical demonstrations to creators presenting their work. Check out upcoming meetings here.
Bluestockings Bookstore hosted the Symposium this week for artist Jen Ferguson’s talk about her racetrack drawings. Primarily a fine artist, Ferguson has also been drawing at New York racetracks for the past decade. As an art student at Pratt, she drew on-location at train stations and other public venues and thought, “why not the track?”
Ferguson draws at two local tracks; the Aqueduct and Belmont Park (although she was also invited to draw at the upstate Saratoga Race Course). First making quick pencil and watercolor sketches on site, Ferguson later works them up to finals at her studio. Working stealthily and wearing a hat and “schlumpy” clothing to blend in, Ferguson also shoots reference photos with a small camera at hip-level. Although there aren’t many women at the track, the crowd doesn’t take much notice of her except to suggest that she might be a cop or an IRS agent. Ferguson loves that laid-back attitude; there are “no pretensions,” just “people just being themselves.”
Ferguson finds racetracks full of strange characters, desolate and haunting architecture, and, of course, horses in motion. She began her presentation by showing works by other artists who’ve been similarly drawn to this setting: Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Albert Ryder. As someone partial to Ronald Searle’s approach to depicting horses, Ferguson especially prizes racetrack art that expresses the personalities of the people, horses, and atmosphere.
She focuses on the little details that give the track character: the chatty driver of the Courtesy Bus between the track and the subway, the logic betters use to choose their horses, the old bars (many of which have closed or become part of a new casino), and the colorful vocabulary regulars use to describe the horses, jockeys, and each other. “Stoopers,” for instance, are betters who lean over the rail, and are also called “railbirds” (the title of Ferguson’s book of racetrack sketches and vignettes that came out in 2009).
Saying that she does “accentuate some of the grotesqueness” of the crowd’s features, Ferguson remarked that they’re not too far from reality. Many of the people at the track are compelling subjects to draw because of their expressive faces and bodies. Unlike the swell crowd in the “Here Comes the Lamb” Victorian racetrack illustration, the modern-day regulars are working class. Fancier people only show up on big stakes days and hang out in the winner’s circle. However, with their exaggerated hats, makeup, and outsize personalities, they are no less interesting to look at than the usual crowd.
John Perrotta, a writer for the HBO horse-racing show Luck, saw Ferguson’s art through the show’s director, David Milch. After the series was cancelled, Perrotta began serializing the remaining Luck scripts on the web with Ferguson’s illustrations. You can see these stories here.
Having amply demonstrated her devotion to the track, Ferguson recently got her NYRA (New York Racing Administration) Media credentials, giving her greater access to races and events.
Ferguson ended the talk with her childhood drawing of a horse. Drawing horses was one of the first reasons she got into art, and she keeps this interest alive and well as she returns to the racetrack to draw.
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Image 1: Jen Ferguson, Photo by Andrea Tsurumi, 2013
Image 2: “Here Comes the Lamb,” Fores’s Sporting Notes & Sketches, 1884-1900
Image 3: Albert Ryder, “The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse),” 1895-1910
Image 4: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “Le Jockey,” 1899
Image 5: Jen Ferguson, Racehorses + Railbirds, 2009
Image 6: Jen Ferguson, “Have a Nice Evening,” Out of Luck, March 24, 2013
Image 7: Jen Ferguson, “You’re a Genius,” Out of Luck, April 21, 2013
Image 8: Jen Ferguson and Amanda Ferguson, “Kentucky Derby Poster,” Spring 2013
Image 9: Jen Ferguson, courtesy of Jen Ferguson’s blog, February 2013.
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About the author: Andrea Tsurumi is a NY-based illustrator and cartoonist recently graduated from SVA’s Illustration MFA program. You can see her work here and check out her latest projects here.
