Rococo Hairdos

To pass the time I like to draw faces. I have a bias toward men's faces; I think because I like drawing them eccentric or humorous and I hesitate to make fun of women. Does that make sense? Here I am making fun of the hair and doing my best to represent the women with dignity and respect. (Does anyone recognize the dark-haired woman lower right?)

What's On Your Mind, Part II

I have an exercise I do sometimes, to get my brain moving, to get the ideas from my head to my hand to my pencil. I draw a face. I draw an oval, or I draw the arrangement of features. Why are they always arranged the same, like a place setting? There's no law about that, so I rearrange the furniture, put the ear where the nose usually is, or insert a spoon or an automobile in its place. What is it saying to me? Usually nothing, but it opens a door to resemblances that we train ourselves to ignore. Rule-breaking is the first rule of art. The world isn't two dimensional but the paper is. The offbeat equations we make don't need to be outright surreal to be interesting. The brain is who we are, so why not draw it into that space? Is he asleep, or thinking, or dead? Sometimes the best drawing is inconclusive.

Les belle dames sans merci

I remember the line from Tennyson, but I can't remember if it is the beautiful woman without mercy or the beautiful woman who always says "No, thank you." Don't blame me for the mercilessness of these faces. I drew them after leafing through a copy of Vogue.

Orientation (a book of stories)

This is an instance of a sketchbook drawing finding a life in print. The pencil drawing has become a whole new metier, a new style for me since the cover of the John Waters book, which is nice because I think in pencil. So I can take a thought, darken the line a little or a lot, add color, shift color, create variations. I sent this pencil drawing to the art people at Farrar Straus and Charlotte Strick replied saying she had just the book for it. A book of stories by Daniel Orozco (Faber, 2011). (Faber and Faber is another imprint they publish.) I added the color to the faces, inserted a couple of women's faces (it had originally been just odd looking men), devised the colored type, did an FF colophon in pencil and a scribbled edge for the back and flap.

Now available in a store near you. (And, as one short story writer to another, the stories are pretty great.)

Suburbia A to Z

I've been working on textile designs for the past several weeks. This was just one of the ideas I worked up. Fabric has always made me think of the domestic landscape; the way patterns and shapes are repeated, the harmony of colors. I've been working on a book following the long unfolding story of a road in a more linear fashion. This image is a variation on that. A short excerpt from a remembered suburbia.

Portrait of a Crowd

People in an elevator? It looks like that. Actually it's a thumbnail from a drawing I did depicting America's suspicion of otherness. Our suspicion of immigrants and other ethnicities and other religions. When it comes right down to it, we are not very tolerant here, despite being a nation made up of others and immigrants, a nation founded by free thinkers, founded to welcome other religions. Divide and conquer is an ugly strategy, except it works very well. Especially when there is money behind it.

An Interesting Face

I painted this for an African American magazine some years ago. An interesting assignment, but I remember having to repaint it because I'd gotten the skin color wrong, which surprised me. I don't know whether this was the acceptable version or not. It shows how sensitive we are to shades of difference. I did art for a Japanese liquor ad once. I remember being very careful to get the Japanese face just right, clearly Japanese but short of stereotype. The client kept having me adjust features: the nose, the skin color, the eyes. Finally they instructed me to make the hair blond. I told them I was confused; didn't they want the person to appear Japanese? No, they didn't. But instead of telling me so outright, they'd had me remove the ethnic distinctions one by one, and I'd carefully done so.

Absolutely Meaningless

Just a drawing, nothing more. Sometimes the arrangement of shapes and details gives me an idea for another drawing. I did get an idea this morning from this but plan to let it sit for a while, look at it and think about it and come back to it later.

Doodling

I learned that less detail makes the remaining detail more noticeable. You look at the small inflections, subtle emotions and the larger pattern because I left out the hair, the ears, the lips.

Happy

Drawings sometimes invent themselves. I put them down the way I take a message for my wife, assuming the information is self-explanatory. For instance, I don't know what the arrow means in this one, but I'm sure it makes perfect sense to you. Happy is a very fungible word, useful in any context. I could have put it next to a drawing of a frowning man and you would assume I meant it ironically. Actually, I drew this in an ironic mood. Maybe the arrow implies irony. Maybe irony is in the ear of the beholder.

Iconography

This is one of my favorites from the dot series. I love it because it is so meaningless, which is another way of saying it could mean anything. I do no sketches and study no reference for this kind of painting. I carefully paint the dots, then quickly add the icons. I can't be thinking of anything or looking at anything or trying to say anything, which sounds kind of like bullshit. I suppose it is. I'm curious to see what comes out of the brush when I'm not trying to draw anything in particular. If something concrete comes into my head I make sure it's painted upside down. This is called method. It's a variation on the method I use to paint bagatelles, a way of tricking the subconscious into committing itself to paper.

Faces

Because I never went to art school and never drew live models, I learned how to draw people by looking at art, seeing what I liked and how it was done. Which may explain why my style is as various as it is. Sometimes borrowing a cast of eye or a gesture from Max Beckman, organizing a landscape like Edward Bawden, setting the feet or rendering brickwork the way Ronald Searle did. These faces remind me a little bit of Graham Laidler (Pont), who drew English characters for Punch: the dotted eyes especially. A roomful of people like this becomes an exercise in repeat colors as much as anything, trying to create a balance of pattern and palette, and an even mixture of races, classes and genders. The art director was Mike Schacherer, then of Little + Co.