(February 26, 1928 - May 1, 2009)My friend and teacher Ric Estrada has passed away after a 14 year battle with cancer. Born in Cuba, Ric had a remarkable life. He went to the University of Havana with Fidel Castro and was sponsored for emigration to the United States by Ernest Hemingway, who was a close friend of Ric`s journalist uncle.
Ric was a comic book artist, a cartoonist, a commercial artist, an animator, an educator and a movie cameraman, a function he filled on the movie
The Old Man and the Sea at the request of his friend Hemingway.
Ric was an amazing artist. He would stand at the large pad of drawing paper at the front of the classroom with a pencil in one hand and a Japanese brush marker in the other. He would casually pencil with one hand and ink with the other all the time explaining the thought process behind the drawing.
The story I heard was that he was a charter member of the Edgar Cayce Society of New York City. Not sure about that. But Ric was in the bohemian fast track. He did hang with Hemingway and his crowd and was in the heart of the hard drinking world of New York City art in the 50s.
Ric`s life took a downward turn when he was working in Berlin. He succumbed to alcoholism in the midst of a divorce from his first wife. His downward spiral accelerated with the loss of his job and he found himself one night on his knees, in the apartment that he was scheduled to he evicted from in the morning. He prayed for divine help. Which came in the form of Mormon missionaries knocking on his door.
Ric was a devout Mormon for the rest of his life and an elder of the church in his later years. He never drank again. I have found that most overly religious western types share a common trait of closed-minded condescending superiority that makes rational discussion impossible. Not the case with Ric.
He had found something that worked for him. His prayer had been answered. He no longer drank. His life was turned around but he felt no need to export his beliefs to every single person he met. He seemed to know that other people had other paths.
My first year at the Kubert School I use to get dragged into long religious discussions with Ric: dragged by Tom Yeates. Tom would get the ball rolling but then get in over his head and run out of ammunition, not having a religious upbringing. Knowing that I had a god scared fundamentalist Christian childhood; Yeates would run down 3 flights of stairs at the Old Baker Mansion and drag me and my verse and chapter up stairs to back up his points against Ric.
I hated religious discussions at that time of my life because of the mental abuse of my childhood and because of the condescending closed minds of the fanatics that normally started such exchanges to give themselves the chance to preach. I hated it when fanatic retreated to
I`ll pry for you when their logic was cut to ribbons by someone who really knew their holy book. Ric was never like that. He had an open and inquisitive mind, agile, quick and logical. And he never seemed to need outside conformation in the from of converts to reinforce his own beliefs.
I was not one of the best illustrators at the school. I was in my 20s before I decided that I had to be an artist. So I had a hard time with portfolio envy at the Kubert School. It seemed to me that everybody was a better artist than me. One of the most important things Ric did for me was his statement:
I’m not worried about your future Larry, you are very creative, anybody can learn to draw but no one can learn to be more creative then they are. He taught levels of competency at every phase of the commercial art process.
If they pay for rough pencils you must be able to deliver good rough pencils. If they want to pay for finished pencils you need to be able to deliver good finished pencils. The artist should be able to stop at any stage of the project and have a professional product. The customer is always going to try to get more art for less money. As an art it is your job to give value for the dollar but you owe it to yourself and all other artist not to sell your skills cheaply.Ric is survived by his wife, 9 children, the professionals who worked with him and a lot of his students who love and respect him. His son Seth is working on a documentary about Ric`s life. I will have more information later about this project.
