Eighty Black and White Drawings

Sometimes others offer suggestions that might be not bad ideas, but I resist acting upon them because they involve a lot of time and energy with no certain rewards. Yet I have followed two of them. The first one was to create a digital catalogue of my art works, replete with images, descriptions and catalogue numbers. It was a lot of work at first to hunt down older works and to scan old slides. But now I make it a daily habit to catalogue. At the very least, it makes images always at the ready to send to a client, upload to a web site, or have on hand for someone who might be writing about my work.

The second piece of advice also required a lot of work, but not fortunately not nearly as much cataloguing a life’s work. This second piece of advice I actually heard twice. And since I heard it twice it seemed like it would be worth considering. I had written a book of poetry many years ago for just over one hundred small square paintings. Someone at an exhibition of these paintings suggested I do them all over again as black and white drawings and create a book out of them. "Black and white would be so much more economical to print," he added.

Last year a friend helped create a PDF file of the book in color. "You might think about doing all these over again as drawings, as black and white would be so much easier to print," she mentioned. It would have been easiest at that point to simply suggest converting the color book into a black and white book, but I saw an opportunity here in that many of my paintings were created from drawings. Since these were only studies they were hastily done and not intended as finished products. But since I was already do so much work on paper I decided to flesh out these old drawings, creating new drawings when there were no preparatory sketches.

As the months have rolled by on this project, I’ve put together a nice collection of figurative drawings. I had settled on doing about eighty drawings and have just passed the halfway point at forty-four completions. The last two, the drawing for "The Contortion," and the drawing for "The Red Shirt" are here. But how, exactly does one convey the feeling of a red shirt in a black and white drawing?