Sketching America, One Passport Page at a Time

Three years ago, illustrator and portrait artist Dena Ackerman was sorting through a pile of current and old passports in her Beit Shemesh home when an expired American passport caught her eye. “I thought, ‘This would make an excellent little sketchbook!’” she said. “Did you ever notice how pretty the American passport is?”

Ackerman, who is originally from Los Angeles and now raises her five children in Israel, flipped through the passport to discover the painted and photographed scenes that serve as backdrops for the book’s pages. There are rolling mountains and grazing animals, a totem pole, a train, and a ship with billowing sails. Along the top of each page is a historical quote celebrating American greatness. Ackerman was inspired to create her own sketches, using the already-existing backgrounds and quotes as the “springboard” for her drawings. 

“One of the best ways to spark creativity is to work within certain limitations,” she said. “In this case, these restrictions (size and subject matter) made it a really enjoyable project.”

Ackerman has been drawing and painting since she was a child, and she sold her first commissioned painting for $300 as a teenager. But she didn’t turn her passion into a career until much later in her life, once she already had children of her own. Then, she got a job illustrating a children’s book. In the 15 years since, she has illustrated more than 40 books and created hundreds of custom portraits. She also teaches adult art classes, both in person and online.

That doesn’t stop her from pursuing personal projects, and playing around with an expired passport was just her style. “Many artists find one thing they are good at, and stick to it. But I love experimenting with subject matter, style, and medium,” Ackerman said. “It keeps life exciting. It is both exhilarating and exasperating to know that there is always more to learn and new skills to master.”

Though she first picked up the old passport in 2023, for a couple of years she only added the occasional drawing. It was only this year that she fully committed to finishing the project. 

“I wanted this project to be fun and relaxing, without worrying about making a perfect drawing,” she said. “I went straight in with ink, paint, colored pencils, and markers without preliminary pencil sketches. The drawings are rough, and there are plenty of mistakes, but that’s part of the joy of it.” To the casual examiner, the 15 miniature drawings don’t appear that way. They fit right in with the pieces she posts on her website and her Instagram page: people and scenes full of movement and personality. 

There is the first drawing she made in the book, a couple dancing on a dock with the visa pages’ ship-at-sea background integrated into the scene. It all has a “giddy and hopeful” feeling to her. She isn’t quite sure who this mystery couple even is. “Immigrants starting a new life? A sailor returning to his sweetheart? Family reunited?” she wonders. “Whoever they are, it feels to me like a new beginning.” Another set of visa pages uses a train backdrop to feature a drawing of two people embracing at the station, what she says is a “goodbye.” “I don’t know who is leaving or where they’re going, but the train will soon be approaching to carry off a loved one,” she said. “And if they will meet again, no one knows…” There is a cowboy mid-lasso against a backdrop of a farmer herding cattle, and a family watching fireworks against a towering Mount Rushmore.

Then there are drawings of iconic American figures, like the Founding Fathers, Betsy Ross, Uncle Sam, a continental soldier, and Mark Twain – who appears next to another sketch of the famous fence-whitewashing scene from his classic novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 

Against a totem pole background and below a quote from the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address is a sketch of the Pilgrims and Native Americans at the first Thanksgiving. With bison and a mountain range in the distance is a sketch of Sacajawea, pointing into the distance. Ackerman also sketched Anna Julia Cooper, the author, educator, and activist who was born into slavery and whose quote is featured in the passport above a Statue of Liberty background.

In all, the creative process and the themes she depicted were both, in her words, “an exercise in freedom.” She completed the project in late July, shortly after the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

Though most of her artwork is made for others, this will likely stay a personal project for now. Still, she has more expired passports to work with and envisions using Israeli ones as well. “I think they’d make cool collector’s items,” she said. “But the legal question of selling off old passports (although all the personal details have been ripped out or painted over) makes certain types of people nervous!”

That is the last feeling she wants anything she creates to evoke. “I want people looking at my art to feel that we have something in common,” she said. This can be as particular as a love for “cats and drinking tea” or something larger: “the sound of rain when you’re cozy at home, a walk in a garden, the love of country, the joy of a good book,” she said. When she looks at others’ artwork, she can feel nostalgia even for things she has never experienced herself.

“To be an artist is to create worlds, stir emotions, and capture fleeting moments,” she said. Sometimes, she feels she has accomplished this larger purpose. But most of the time, she said, there just isn’t enough time to, as she puts it, “make the art that’s living inside of me.” Either way, it’s worth it. “Being an artist is 10% inspiration, 50% perspiration, and 40% frustration!” she said. “And there’s nothing else I’d rather do.”