Twelve yellow-framed windows are closely spaced on the front of a three-story red-brick townhouse. A dog intently peers out of each window, looking toward the street.
The intricately detailed acrylic painting depicts dogs of many sizes, colors and breeds, including a beagle, a Chihuahua, a Boston terrier and a chocolate Labrador retriever that looks just like the tail-wagger on the cover of the book “Dogs Rule, Nonchalantly” by Mark Ulriksen.
Dogs are loyal and patient, and “whether you’ve been gone for 5 minutes or for 5 hours, they’ll greet you like you’ve been gone for 5 years,” says the text next to the painting of 12 doggies in the windows.
Mr. Ulriksen originally created the painting for a 2007 cover of The New Yorker. A freelance artist and illustrator since 1994, he’s done 49 covers for the fabled magazine.
The 143-page book is filled with 67 beautifully reproduced, brightly colored paintings of dogs — including “The Dogs of My Life,” as Mr. Ulriksen titles one of the six paintings he did specifically for this book.
The last three pages have thumbnail pictures of each painting, telling us where they were originally displayed or reproduced. They appeared on the covers or inside pages of The New Yorker and The Atlantic, a children’s book called “Dog Show,” Bark magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, and O, The Oprah Magazine.
Others were painted for gallery shows or were privately commissioned. Mr. Ulriksen, a self-taught painter and illustrator, had 100 dog paintings to pick from for his own book.
“Dogs Rule, Nonchalantly” is a celebration of life with dogs — other people’s dogs and his own dogs, especially chocolate Labs Ted and Henry.
“My two retrievers couldn’t have been more different,” he writes.
“Ted — Never spent a single night in a kennel. Too many friends wanted to dog-sit him.”
“Henry — On his first sleepover with friends, pooped in their living room, dining room and kitchen. Henry has stayed in many kennels.”
For a professional artist and illustrator, he writes lovely prose. It’s very brief, concise, charming and funny. Toward the end of the book it’s poignant but never maudlin: “Dogs have such short lives. They deserve to be spoiled,” he writes on page 123.
“Ted was a perfect dog: smart, friendly and obedient,” he writes on page 25.
“As Ted grew old and feeble he became more stoic. He had done all the barking, fetching, scratching, licking, scarfing, chasing, leaning, snuggling, shedding and drooling that he was meant to do. It was his time to move on. He never whined or whimpered,” he wrote on page 125.
“I cried for a week,” Mr. Ulriksen wrote on the next page, opposite a 2003 painting, “Ted in Heaven.” It shows a blissed-out chocolate Lab on a white cloud, surrounded by green tennis balls with angel wings.
A San Francisco native, Mr. Ulriksen and his wife, professional photographer Leslie Flores, live in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood with daughters Emmy, 23, and Lily, 18, and Henry, 12, the Dogs Rule cover dog.
Twenty years ago he said he was “burned out as a magazine art director and wondered what if I could just stay at home and draw,” he said in a telephone interview. “I was 37 years old and had a 2-year-old” when he quit his job.
He quickly got work in Rolling Stone, Esquire and GQ, and has been earning a good living ever since.
Go to markulriksen.com to see some of his other paintings, including those depicting another personal passion, baseball in general and the San Francisco Giants in particular. He has done baseball paintings for The New Yorker and other magazines. He produces fine art commemorative prints when his home team plays in the World Series, which seems to be almost constantly, lately.
“Sorry the Giants beat your Pirates,“ he was kind enough to say of last year’s wild card playoff game.
The book is $29.95 and published by Goff Books/ORO Editions in San Francisco.
Article and image sourced from http://www.post-gazette.com/pets/pet-tales/2015/04/11/Pet-Tales-An-illustrator-falls-in-love-with-dogs/stories/201504110004, by Linda Wilson Fuoco
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