Here’s a chalk drawing I did of the Spirit of St Louis at night. The original is very monochrome but I love how the blues came out in the photo.
I’m not one to make Charles Lindbergh into a villain, or an anti-Semite, or anything else he was not. He was a very intelligent, innovative, multifaceted person who was woefully oversimplified by the media.
This drawing was done on black mattboard with square hard chalks and a little white acrylic paint pen. Mattboard, by the way, especially the deep black stuff, makes a great surface for chalks. I was thinking about this quote from his autobiography about the first Atlantic crossing:
By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he’s a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it’s an intellectual knowledge; it’s a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and mind’s heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space.
– Charles Lindbergh, The Spirit of St Louis, 1953
Mindflight 