The next few posts will be sketchbook drawings from my vacation in North Carolina late August. These drawings reflect a shift in my thinking and drawing. For one, my ideas about America have been crystallized. Unfortunately, I no longer see the promise of a more perfect union because as I have come to realize, this country’s brain damage is permanent. On the drawing front, my sketchbook drawing is becoming the center point of all of my creative work. My next animation and a new series of etchings will be based on the drawings I will be posting here.
Confirming my suspicions, on the spot drawing opens up the brain in ways that a thoughtful and considered drawing can’t. As I have told my drawing students in the past, thinking can kill drawing. Strange but true. Intuition is the driver of great drawing not slow plodding hammering away.
So, at the end of the pier and looking down at the American paradise. It is a sea of broken bodies and broken souls. You be the judge if these drawings reflect something sad, cynical, decaying, bloated, broken, busted, vacant or all of the above or none of the above. I see an endangered species roaming around like a large animal too big and too weird to live with no idea that with each high fructose soda they creep closer to a stressed gurney under fluorescent lights at the end of their world.
Tags: americans, caricature, drawing, louis netter, reportage drawing, satire, social commentary, summer, the beach
Torture – Through the channels
22 AprThis is a piece specifically created for a book about torture. The idea came from a well known Norman Rockwell painting called Gossip. In Rockwell’s painting, a juicy bit of gossip is spread through a town and eventually the source found and chastised. In my version, the directive to torture is passed through several people and the result is…well, torture. I was interested in the bureaucracy of torture. It has to start somewhere and likely, it was a decision that shocked, thrilled and dismayed different parties. Still, it went forward and still does to this day.
Tags: americans, caricature, drawing, louis netter, Norman Rockwell, satire, social commentary