I tried to merge my face with my brother Mike’s. Mike was autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. His eyes didn’t seem to work together. Mike shaped a good part of my life, and he is never totally out of my thoughts.
I had been thinking of creating self portraits in the styles of different artistic genres. The first that came to my mind was cubism. My knowledge of cubism is the breaking down of scenes into component planes. In some cubist paintings, it seems as if the space portrayed inside the frame is fractured. I am not conversant enough with this movement to know the rationale (if any) for breaking up space, or if there were any rules at all.
My face doesn’t have many planes. It is a flat face. I couldn’t figure out how to break down my face into component planes. I was moderately successful with the beard. (I inadvertently made myself less scrawny than the original sketch in this series.)
I don’t think this looks like me but Joy thinks it’s better than most of my self portraits thus far. It’s a basic transcription of the photo I took of myself moments before. Since I am getting better at copying, I suppose it is my likeness. I intend to increasingly abstract my facial features in subsequent sketches. We’ll see how it goes.
These 8 sketches are portraits of poses and gestures of people doing one activity or another.
Dancer in the street. June 1990, NYC.
This person looks like s/he could be a Morris Dancer, but I don’t know what those pillow-like objects are. They might be cases holding old-fashion drums. I do know that this is from a photo I took in 1990 in Brooklyn, NY.
