Conversations in German

My grandfather, Richard Eugene Stultz, who passed away in 1980, was a cigarette smoker as long as I remembered, but he occasionally smoked a pipe. He once told me that we could trace our lineage to William Tell, and showed me a pipe he had acquired on a trip with the American team to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, carved in the likeness of the fabled champion of political freedom and of course, archery. When he died, my grandmother gave me the pipe. I had it professionally cleaned, resisted the pipe shop owner's offer to trade me any pipe in the store for it, and have over the years occasionally filled it with tobacco and smoked it. Otherwise, it has rested in a box or gathered dust on display.

Today, however, as I realized that I couldn't let myself avoid my daily drawing exercise, it came out on the balcony with me where I perched it on the stone parapet facing a contemporary Cornelius Manz bent apple. Although I didn't realize it until just now, it was an apple that William Tell shot from his son's trembling head with a single arrow - a great moment in the folklore of civil disobedience. So, we'll call this one "conversation in German".

8 1/4 x 11 9/16, watercolor pencils and 9B Caran d'Ache Swiss Made Grafwood graphite pencil