2020 DRAWINGS /
The Quarantine Drawings: People Waiting
When I try to write about this all it seems I can’t. Any words I put together feel at once too big and too small. Maybe that’s a cop out. But no matter, the attempt at least unearthed a scant fact recalled from graduate school days of yore, one as pleasantly self-absolving as it is heretical: it can be tiresome to listen to an artist talk, even (or perhaps especially) if the artist in question is you. To be quite honest at this moment I am tired of not only the sound of my own voice but its volatile character too, its facility in achieving moment-to-moment shifts from Pollyanna buoyancy to a kind of viscous, gooey gloom. In time I think this malleability will alter my voice in ways that will make me eager to listen again, to bend to its newnesses. Until then I wait.
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic I began making drawings of the figures that usually live in my paintings. Fifty of them are included in this book. I made one drawing per day to keep my mind quiet. Unlike the hindsight-heavy storylines of my paintings the drawn figures occupy the here and now, and they are doing very little. They stand, sit, eat, fuck, stare out the window, and listen. They are waiting.
