Dan’s Cartoons at the Ferregut Tower Gallery

by Emily J. Weitz

For the past forty-six years, Dan Rattiner’s words have pervaded the press. He has rattled off his inner monologue, capturing the ever-changing life on the East End with utter amusement. This is the man we know. As someone who has sat across a round table from him countless times, watching him sculpt stories out of rumors and shape campaigns out of forgotten causes, I know him as a man of words. But when the Ferregut Tower Gallery took notice of his cartoons, I had to do a double take. His easeful scrawls capture the same controlled amusement that his stories portray and they, too, have traced the development of the culture on the East End.

For the first time, Dan’s visual creativity is taking center stage. But when I probed Dan to find out where his drawings originated, I was surprised. I thought surely they came as an accompaniment to his written work. I knew that in the early years of the newspaper, he did most of the illustrations himself. But he confessed that his sketches were actually his outlet for expression before words became his release. He started drawing in high school, when he was bored in class. He would look tentatively at the teacher and scribble his real thoughts in cartoon form. He liked cartoons because they were funny and he liked showing his work to friends to make them laugh. In fact, when he started his humble newspaper out in Montauk, it was not without the knowledge that he would have a forum for his cartoons.

When I asked Dan what inspired him in his early years, he told me that his ideas usually came from something that made him think, “that’s funny.” He told me a tale of a car that could be taken out into the water and would become a boat. It looked like a car, but if you pushed a few gears, it would cruise right across the lake. To Dan, that contraption was just waiting to be drawn. It’s interesting, as a writer who works for Dan, to see that sometimes his brain works beyond words in a purely visual way. For Dan, there are moments that can only be captured with the quick, knowing motion of a simple sketch. In response to this weird car/boat contraption, Dan drew a cartoon of a single engine airplane flying over a patch of farmland. The caption simply reads, “So now I press this button and it becomes a car?”

Let’s hope so.

I was fixated on the fact that Dan, the successful writer and publisher, was coming out with an art exhibit.

“I don’t understand,” I confessed. “Do you feel you are able to express yourself through these cartoons as fully as you are through the written word?”

“No,” he said simply. “It’s a very different sort of thing. A cartoon is a moment. To me, it’s a moment which is meant to be funny – a comedic moment, and that’s all it is. If you can do it well,” he continued, “there’s the beauty.”

I think I understand. After all, we as humans are all looking for voices for our experience. Dan has managed to capture the irony of this place and time, the mundane sitting slumped beside the glamour, the natural beauty standing proud beside the materialistic. He’s documented it with his newspaper for forty-six years, as the community and the culture at once changed and resisted change.

When the owner of the Ferregut Tower Gallery called Dan to see if he would be interested in showcasing his drawings, Dan was surprised and delighted. He has been lauded for his newspaper, but little public attention has been paid to the clever sketches that often accompany his stories. He is excited that people are actually going to be able to see his drawings. Less than half of the cartoons have ever been on view for the public, though Dan admitted a few of them might have been checked out back in 1966. He used to draw when he felt inspired by something amusing and then keep the sketches in giant baskets. For the upcoming show, he threw in some current pieces to accompany the ones from past decades.

Dan said that twenty percent of the pieces in the show were done in college when he was supposed to be studying architecture or history and instead ended up doodling things he thought were funny. He also doodled at concerts and one of his favorite cartoons, “Sing,” depicts an opera singer whose voice apparently couldn’t distract him from his sketchpad.

Dan has always loved cartoons. He was inspired by the minimalist creations of such personalities as Sempé, a French cartoonist, and Saul Steinberg, an artist who spent a lot of time out here.

In its early years, Dan’s Papers was only published in the summer, so Dan had the winters to himself. One winter, he decided to move into the city and try to make it as a cartoonist. He sold a few cartoons that year, though he didn’t like that carting a museum case of drawings to different agencies and magazines made him feel like more of a salesman than an artist. Still, it was invigorating when he realized that he actually had four cartoon pieces published at one time – Esquire, Saturday Review of Literature, The Realist, and McLeans were all running Dan’s cartoons at the same time that year. At that point, he felt satisfied enough to say that he had done it. Then he returned to the Hamptons, where he was busily building a small empire.

Nevertheless, Dan’s career as a cartoonist did not stop there. And here we are, four decades later, where the East End has finally prepared a tribute to the visual documentary that Dan has been keeping so vigilantly. The upcoming show, titled “Ode to the East End,” will open on February 8 and run until March 20. An opening reception for the artist will take place on Sunday, February 18, from 5 to 7 p.m. Eighty-seven of his drawings will depict his artistic interpretations of the past forty years on the East End. With his swift pen, he has captured the essence of farmers, movie stars, fishermen and Wall Streeters. He has been inspired by beaches, McMansions, farms and vineyards. And the same deep well that has summoned words from his typewriter also, by chance, has brought forth images from his pen.

The Ferregut Tower Gallery is located at 3 South Main Street in Southampton. The hours are Friday through Sunday or by appointment. Please call 631-287-0798. Or visit www.ferreguttowergallery.com.