Old Guy
I’m writing this a few years after finishing the piece.
I’m interested in looking at people and trying to capture who someone is. I don’t have models, so I usually work either from imagination or from photographs. Photographs allow a kind of distance that can help, but I’m also strongly wanting to shy away from photorealism.
The process here was simple: I made a quick line drawing from a photo reference and then used that outline to build the finished painting.
I didn’t correct anything after the initial line which created the expressive qualities I was after.
The reference image came from a documentary about this fertility doctor who repeatedly used his own sperm instead of the intended male. In this scene, an older man was sitting next to his wife of many years, supporting her while she described the trauma of learning decades later that she was inseminated by a doctor with someone else’s sperm. He just sat there looking completely broken.
I don’t think I captured that broken expression. I feel that I did end up showing a person fully isolated, looking inwards in a claustrophobic space.
The drawing itself feels solid to me. The figure has some raw character, and the pencil mark making is strong in my opinion. I was satisfied with the piece when I was done with it. I felt like it was a breakthrough for me in that I am finding an acceptable way to use a photo reference, which has long been something I struggled with. I had been looking at De Kooning’s blind drawings of women where I think he did drawings while not looking at the paper he was working on. I was not using that methodology here. I was thinking about what he did and was pushing myself to not make corrections to the drawing after my initial lines. This approach might seem ‘duh’, but it fundamentally went against my approach to drawing at that point in time.
This was one of the only pieces I finished across several years. I was unhappy, stressed by work, and not feeling like part of the world. Now, when I look at this piece it represents for me that period of my life.