A few weeks ago I conceived of a series of portraits. As a figurative artist I have been teaching Life Drawing extensively, and even when teaching more basic drawing classes I can't help but to introduce Life Drawing principles (hands, portraits in particular) Also, working at the colleges here in Southeast Michigan, I have been directly engaged with the tremendous diversity of people that live here.
So recently when another artist friend of mine proposed that we do a show together I was freshly inspired. Nancy Flanagan (http://www.nancy-flanagan.com/mi_et_al.html) is a recent transplant to the area and has been working on a series of urban landscapes, commenting on the nature of place. I thought that if she can document the spaces, then I can document the people (which sounds a lot like the way we've run our collaborative Drawing Marathons). So with this new idea I began doing research; looking at contemporary and historical artists working with portraiture, mapping out just what I could use and say to make this my own, and beginning the early stages of material and scale exploration, which is where I find myself now.
The goal is to create 100 drawn portraits of the people that live, work and study around me within the next year. What I know is that this series must attempt to be representative of the people I meet, that the drawings must represent the proper physiognomy and acute identities of them, and that it must be large in scale to become a regiment of the full range of them. What I do not know yet is what scale they must be (or even if they have to all be the same scale), what materials I want to use (I work with drawing because I feel it is the most expansive media an artist may choose to work in), and how they will be presented (mounted, framed, hung). I'm not even entirely certain they will remain 2D (there is always 3D and 4D, again, the beauty of being a drawing artist).
The scale of the project does not intimidate me, my last major drawing was 27-feet in length and 3 months in the making. I think the scale will have to be significant for this project to become whatever it will. I know that mediums and conceptual concerns will shift as this series develops, and that is part of the meaning behind it. Something in me, and in my work, is bound to be different by the time those 100 or so portraits are done.
So here is a peak in my studio in the early stages. Not all of my visual research is here, but what you can see is intuitive experimentation with media, surfaces, scale, poses, and abstraction. I'll make an attempt to document the progress along the way. Who is my next model?
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