"If you are not skillful enough...

 .... to sketch a man jumping out of a window 

in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, 

you will never be able to produce great works."

Annette Carlsen: Two Ping guests, of which the one to the right
went onstage to draw in a tribute to Rune T. Kidde.

- Our Exhibit No. A when proving the mastery of the cartoonist.

Annette Carlsen: Anders Lund Madsen,
the host of the evening.

That is after all why it was called a cartoon in the first place: The sketch - carton/cartone - as the backbone for creating the monumental sceneries from mythology of which Delacroix, our quotationist, was a master. The cartoon is the conception and its transformation onto paper in the same take.

It may be closest we have come to any definition of essence of the visual arts.

Annette Carlsen: The publisher Steffen Rayburn-Maarup

Anette Carlsen: Marianne Jelved, Minister of Culture.

The cartoonists joined this year's Ping Awards with an award of their very own. And so, as soon as the show took off, the white rectangles of their drawing pads could be detected in the darkness. 

Annette Carlsen works in a swift synthesis of eye-brain-hand: What her eyes detect is instantly referred onto paper, a series of observations and decision-makings, each noted with short strokes of the pen, before redirecting her eyes to the object of interest. Sometimes she has a longer time at hand, as when our Minister of Culture was speaking. The latter was careful not to reveal to the very last moment who was to receive the award as comics artist of the year. Her careful playing with us in the audience is palpable in Annette's portrait of her, while the arm and hand of Steen Rayburn-Maarup is hardly there and yet fully so, receiving and clutching at the same time, epitomizing a speech of acceptance.

And then there is our sprightly new chairwoman speaking with her arms, the erased ones in symbiosis with the present ones so that we feel we can actually hear her too:

Annette Carlsen: Stine Spedsbjerg, chairwoman of the Danish Comics Council.

Three drawings made in the dark while standing in the densely-packed crowd of guests and the portraits even convey a sense of sound....  making us recall another of Delacroix' words of wisdom:  

"It is often we come the closest to the essence of an artist (...) 

in his or her pocket notebooks and travel sketchbooks (...) 

where written comments and personal notes provide an intimate insight 

into the magical mind of a working artist."

Annette Carlsen, Guests at the Ping Awards.

The artworks shown are courtesy of Annette Carlsen and must not be reproduced without her permission.