A WEEK OF GRUGER, day 5

### OK, so these posts spilled over into more than a week, but here are some more scans from original Gruger drawings that show his masterful draftsmanship.

Gruger uses foliage to add abstract design to his drawing.

Gruger spent 45 years working long hours, creating thousands of complex pictures using not much more than a pencil.  He found infinite variety in the marks of carbon on paper.

Saturday Evening Post, April 10, 1926

Gruger constructed face after face, employing a full variety of features.

Gruger was an original member of the "charcoal club" founded by John Sloan in 1893.  There, Gruger worked nightly alongside other young artists such as Robert Henri, William Glackens and Everett Shin in a vacant studio, exploring the glories of charcoal.

And in the right hands, charcoal is truly a glorious thing. 

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A WEEK OF GRUGER, day 4

### In 1928, Gruger was assigned by the Saturday Evening Post to illustrate a long and tedious detective story.  Rather than draw another dozen pictures of English gentlemen sitting around tables in a parlor, Gruger concoted a wraith-like apparition (not a character in the original story) to embody hidden mysteries. 

Personally, I think Gruger just felt like drawing a cool figure in flowing robes.  Look at how much fun he had with these  pictures:

Another illustration from the same story:

I don't have all of the originals from the story to scan (The two above came from our friends at Taraba Illustration Art ) but if you look at the following printed versions from the Post, you can get a sense for how Gruger drew each wraith distinctively, each with its separate dramatic flourish:

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These are not your run-of-the-mill Halloween ghosts.  Here you are seeing Gruger's vivid imagination in action. ###