Ella Fitzgerald was born on this day in 1917. I had the great privilege of seeing her perform at Radio City Music Hall in 1992. At nearly 75 years of age and having battled health problems, her voice was well past its prime, but her spirit was exuberant and infectious and I have always counted myself very lucky to have seen her last New York appearance.
In honor of her birthday I decided to do some quick sketches of her. I was inspired by the story of Pablo Picasso running into Ella at a restaurant and doodling a surrealist portrait of her on a napkin.
When I draw I am basically winging it, and nearly everything I produce takes hours and hours, even when it doesn't look like it. So for this birthday salute I decided to limit each sketch to no more than 10 minutes. I wound up with about 40 or so sketches. What follows is a sampling of my doodles surveying Ella at various ages, weights, and hair styles. Some of them are more successful than others, but I think a few of them capture a tiny bit of her spirit, or at least I hope they do. They are all either ink or pencil on notebook paper, though the exposures have been played with on some of them to adjust the colors.
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