La Poseur: After Seurat, For Sofia 11 May 2008

Pencil on paper and mixed media.
A gift for my friend Sofia. I drew the picture at a figure drawing session at a studio on Ravenswood in Chicago. Regarding Seurat, see “Les Poseurs” at the Barnes Foundation.

History of the 20th Century 1 May 2008

These works are based on a photograph of a friend I took a few years ago. I used a medium format Mamiya press camera. It gives an extra-long picture compared to most medium format cameras. I suppose I was trying to create a Kafkaesque space, where things are surprisingly present or absent. [...]

Descents 1 May 2008

These pieces are based on the same photograph of Maya as the photohagiography piece. I think it’s instructive in this case to present the photo itself, because it is really a process that starts with the image and never quite moves beyond it:

The floating shapes in the following drawings are kind of like Malevich, [...]

Drawings of photographs that make my friends look like saints II 14 February 2008

Round two.

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press.

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press.

Drawings of photographs that make my friends look like saints 31 January 2008

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press.

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press.
For these pieces, I used lo-fi digital pictures so that the grain of the acrylic ground would act like the “grain” of the digital photograph. I think standing as an alternative to the careful renderings of photographic vision [...]

The Jersey Shore 31 January 2008

“The Sea”
Pencil and oil paint on mat board.

“The Beach Sand”

“Atlantic City”
The figures I’ve drawn over the past couple months are, I realize now, studies for these pictures here. As I was working on the studies, I became increasingly aware of their inadequacy. Each figure was an insubstantial outline, a frame of the human [...]

Seven Figures 8 November 2007

This batch of drawings is called, “The beach was cold, but after diving into the freezing water she became a source of heat as vast as the absent sun, as hardened to the ocean as the grain of sand, an indestructible remnant of a former, larger whole.” Or, “Taking a dump in the sea.”

I [...]

Six Figures 25 October 2007

Pencil and pastel on Arches hot press.
Drawn from a live model. Each pose was between ten and fifteen minutes long. I went to a figure drawing session at a local art center that offers a few classes like “Developing a visual vocabulary,” but this seems to constitute nothing more than recreating a chest cavity [...]

Five figures 25 October 2007

Pencil and soft pastel on paper.
These are studies — they are not drawn from life, they’re out of my head. I been drawing “for about seventeen years, OK? I don’t draw from life anymore, I just kick it from my head, you know what I’m saying, I can do that.” Heh, sorry, [...]

Madonna in Studio 11 October 2007

Conte crayon, pastel, and pencil on bristol board.
This is a new drawing, much smaller than the Large Madonna below. Big stylistic cues from Giacometti on this. The room is my studio corner.