Shedding Light on an Old Art Form in Essex, Connecticut

ESSEX - The lighthouses are welcome landmarks and beacons to boaters on Long Island Sound.

Crisply detailed black and white renderings of the familiar beacons line the walls of this Essex artist's home. And, unlike typical marine art - done in paint or pastel on canvas, these are created on scratchboard, an art form and material dating back from the early and mid-20th century, used and known for its graphic qualities.

Artist William Kusche, a retired draftsman, has had a long love affair with lighthouses, boats and trains, which have inspired him to take photographs to turn into scratchboard drawings. Kusche always loved art but decided to go into the black and white format after discovering he was partially color blind when attempting to enlist in the Navy.

As a draftsman who designed circuit boards, the incredible detail work was appealing to Kusche.

He explains that scratchboard art is "very time consuming; I do most of my work under a magnifying glass. You really have to have patience."

Perhaps older readers remember a time when scratchboards were quite popular in magazine and newspaper ads between 1930 and 1950. Scratchboard was the medium of choice for printed advertisements replacing wood, metal and linoleum engravings as it allowed for high quality reproduction.

Kusche has a notebook in which he collected some of these vintage ads including the work of John McCormick who did drawings for the Miller High Life advertising campaign.

Some of those ads involved color spot printing of a particular portion of the ad and the black and white scratchboard image was placed over the color. Other scratchboard art has been used in newspaper ads as recently as the past decade (Kusche has kept clippings of these as well). He pointed to one advertising Yale-New Haven Hospital that was printed in a 1998 issue of the Pictorial Gazette.

Scratchboard is a quite unique type of artwork, Kusche noted, adding "you don't sit down and sketch, you trace the photograph and you transfer the drawing onto the black (ink)."