Can you use a laugh? Shelter Island’s funniest man has a new book
Shelter Island is blessed by inhabitants with a sense of humor, and at the top of that list is Peter Waldner.
From 1999 until 2011, Peter wrote and drew a daily, syndicated cartoon called Flight Deck that appeared daily in The New York Daily News among other newspapers, and he has been a weekly fixture in the Shelter Island Reporter for decades.
His latest work, Searching for Scraps can be described as a multi-media (art/photography/doggerel) romp among the places and people who live and love here. It is very funny.
On Saturday, July 27, 2024, Peter will be signing books at Shelter Island Art House on Grand Avenue (look for the ‘Stairway to Heaven” sign) from 4 to 6.
Peter has written several books before this one, but described the writing process for “Searching for Scraps” as different because he did it backwards, writing the story around an archive of photographs.
It started with “Flat Bob” a life-size poster made from a photograph Peter took of the late filmmaker and artist, Bob Markel. With Markel’s permission, “Flat Bob” was photographed all over town, (that idea came from Mary Theinert, another local artist with an enlarged funny bone) and the resulting images appeared as a running gag in the Reporter to raise awareness for the annual Shelter Island artist’s tour, ARTSI.
Peter knew he was on to something when Bob Markel’s wife, Joan asked her husband what he was doing down at Wades Beach after seeing a photograph in the paper of an appealing young woman who agreed to be photographed with Flat Bob.
Peter began creating painted foamboard likenesses of local animals, which he photographed and ran in the the Reporter as a kind of participatory cartoon event with local people, who were often eager to pose with Flat Bob, or one of Peter’s creatures.
The resulting book is a collection of tall tales. “Every picture has a story to go with it. I took the deer — a not-real creature named Tick — down to Wades Beach and saw the guy sleeping, and I just took the picture, “Peter said. “I picked up my friend Leah Friedman, who is 90, and said, ‘Do you want to go take a picture?’ She said, ‘Of course!’ So we went down to Wades beach and Leah wanted to get up in the lifeguard stand, and I said no way. She said, ‘Just because I’m blind doesn’t mean my legs don’t work.’ There I was shoving her up onto the lifeguard stand.”
• Shelter Art House, open house and book signing with Peter Waldner and additional works by photographer Betsy Colby and painter Charlie Hergrueter.
• The main show is Cynthia McDonald, photographer.
• Saturday July 27, 2024, 4-6pm
• Wine and refreshments
