I have always called these things rough drafts. It was an easy description that I never really examined until fellow artist and friend Christine Forni started to refer to them as map drawings. Perhaps, her term was better chosen. But what in fact are they?

 

When Albany academy for girls art teacher Susan Darling first put a Rapidograph technical pen in my hand in 1980 I was totally seduced. There was something about the intensity and finish of the lines that appealed. I was ready to adopt anything that might add a hint of gravitas, as I was not an especially assured draftsman. My first drawings were abstract and spontaneous. But when I eventually turned to representation, I discovered one major issue: you had to get it right the first time. There was no erasing. You couldn’t scrape the paint off with a palette knife and start again. No. You had to be sure of everywhere the ink was to go before your pen touched the paper. This meant planning.   

 

My earliest drawings of this type were essentially reworking earlier pencil drawings in this pen and ink format. At the time I had an antique glass topped desk. To facilitate this translation process I removed this very sheet of glass and placed it between two filing cabinets with a desk lamp underneath. I had jury rigged what was to become the light table technique that has stayed with me to this day. I would take sketched outlines and project them from behind the actual drawing paper. The bright light of the desk lamp would make my heavy Bristol board translucent enough that I was essentially tracing these sketched guidelines.

 

Eventually I began constructing elaborate perspective systems with vanishing points as far as 2 feet off the table. I was using parallel rulers and circular forms. But these drafts would all be just simple line guides upon which I would later construct textures with my technical pens. Sometimes I would even put graph paper beneath the layers of prep on the light table so that my cross hatching and stippling could be uniform. I was essentially using the light table to create hand made zip-a-tone like textures to mimic the commercial graphic arts techniques that were wide spread in the early 1980s. This technique was useful in constructing imaginary spaces rather than drawing from life or from photos. It was the way I constructed the 42 page graphic novel I completed from 1982-85.

 

Eventually, however, I did become interested in drawing from photos. When I turned to drawing what would become Outing in 1985, I had to re-evaluate this technique. Previously I had simply used lines to indicate where shadows might fall. Just how dark these shadows might be was something I decided as I was working in the ink, not in advance. In these drawings there were only two values: shadow and not shadow. I was essentially focusing on only the outlines of objects and their placement within the visual spaces of my drawings. If one looks at the drawings I did prior to 1985, one sees this huge emphasis on line. As I was considering drawing the complicated values that would make up Katie Christensen’s hair, face and arms I realized I would need to construct scales of relative value. I began to isolate what I though were homogenous fields of value and later assigning them a numeric progression. 

 

Outing is kind of an interesting moment in the evolution of my technique because you can see the transition from line to stippling happening within the drawing itself. The grass is an example of a highly simplified system of three values. The black parts would be black in the final drawing. The red parts were the highlights that would be left as close to blank as possible. Of course I still enclosed even these grass highlights within a line border. There is a bunch of riotous texture in the grass that is kind of fun in retrospect. I remember staring at a Franklin Booth drawing for days before I got the nerve to do this. But this texture is essentially a substitute for what should be a range of mid values. Katie’s hair has a similar 3 tone value system: all black darks, tightly overlapping lines mid value, and almost no overlapping lines for the highlight value. I remember calling this “a three system” in my head as I was working on it. But by the time I got to the face, arm and the paper bag there were so many different values that I decided I needed a more well controlled way of applying this value. This may be the moment that I forever associated myself with the dot drawing technique. I started to assign these areas values from 0-4. Eventually I realized that there were areas I would want to assign 2.5 and other half steps as well. I definitely needed stippling for this.

 

This system of designation would eventually expand to cover 23 different values (see the chart below). But it didn’t happen all at once. In Covering, my next project I added a green as well as a red in the draft. There was a considerably more complicated set of values in Receiver which followed. I took what seemed at the time to be the extreme step of coloring in over 8 different colors on the main figure. The first draft that was done entirely in a full color system was Reading. I chose to use the most brilliant Dr. Marten’s watercolors that I could find. I wanted to use colors that would have a maximum contrast. For this reason Christine’s description of these drafts as map drawings seems most appropriate. I wanted the borders of areas of value to be as clearly demarcated as country borders on a map.

 

Ideally every color - grass green, dark blue etc. - should represent an absolute value. It should represent the same value in every drawing; but there are always certain things that are just too chaotic to be this precise with. Hair is probably the best example. For this I expanded what I first called a “3 system” to a “5 system.”  I would first identify the brightest areas (red) and then do the darkest (black). I could then go back in and identify the next brightest ares (yellow) and likewise the next darkest (green). The mid range would be whatever was left blank after I was finished. Jim Forni’s straw hat in Adjustments was probably the first successful application of this technique. The straw in Cast was also done this way. Probably my favorite example is the caning in the footstool in On Television.

 

My drawings became more and more complicated as time went on. The process may sound simple enough. Trust me. It is not. It is probably the most mentally taxing part of every drawing. If you designate some area as a 4 and the area next to it which has a perceptible border a 3.5, those areas designations have to be compatible with what has been designated 4 and 3.5 on the opposite side of someone’s face in the same drawing - not to mention everywhere else. There is a lot of checking and re-checking. I have often compared it to mining. One digs a hole. But as the tunnel continues one has to be continually building ceiling and wall reinforcements to avoid cave ins. One of the stylistic choices I have made is to push the values I assign more to the extremes. If one has only 20 different ways to represent value and a scene is confined between 50-80% black it is sometimes helpful to stretch it out to 40-90% black. I usually boost the DEFINITION adjustment on my digital photos before beginning work so that the contrast between neighboring values is more extreme. Many of my subjects are convinced that I prefer to use unflattering photos as source material. They may have a point; but some of the ugliness also comes from this contrast boosting.

 

In addition to colors representing value, there are also arrow markers in these drafts that show rates of transition and blending. I expanded this system to levels of even greater complexity when I began doing color work in late 2015. I wrote about that process at some length in a discussion of Discovery of Water here.

 

I had always made these drafts with no concern for how they might look to anyone else. Yet, sometimes people would catch sight of them as I would open a portfolio or move things around the studio - and people would become fascinated. In the fall of 1988 I finished the draft of Grill, and it would be fair to say that this was the most baroque draft I had ever created. Even I started to become fascinated with its appearance. I began to think seriously about the relationship between the draft/map drawing and the final drawing. At the time I was obsessed with how stippling dots were the cleanest and most emotionally pared down “dumb marks” with which one could make a drawing; but what were these “marks” in the draft? Were these the most unselfconscious expressions of my reading of how a photo (or photos) should be rendered? They seemed to contain within them all the pertinent information from which to build an image. If I was a contractor, these would be my blue prints. If I were a photographer these would be my negatives. As the world became progressively more digital and on line I began to think of them as the source code. By the time The Matrix  was released in 1999 I had been thinking of the underlying constructs of images in this way for over a decade. 

 

In 1990 I made the decision to show these drafts along side the finished work. At the time I described it as a mathematician showing his work in a proof. I also would compare it to the decisions of the designers of the George Washington Bridge to leave the structural and support girders bare and unadorned. But the map drawings couldn’t help but have their own appearance too. After I finished Grill I began work on a very large acrylic painting that translated all the map work onto canvas. It was a hideously ugly painting that takes no steps to show style or finesse. In retrospect I think its awkwardness was kind of the point. One of my favorite exhibitions at the time was at McHenry County College in Crystal Lake, IL. It consisted of just Contact, Grill, the draft for Grill (titled Grill #2) and the painting of the draft (titled Grill #3). This may have been a shout out to an earlier favorite of mine Jennifer Bartlett’s In the Garden series from the early 1980s.  It was also a reaction to an exhibition I saw at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago the previous year.

 

This exhibition took up an entire wall (60-70 feet as I recall) It was a detailed history of everything that it took to print an image on the cover of a fashion magazine (or the Sunday paper. I forget precisely) It started with film, then a negative, then a color print (and the cyan, magenta, yellow entailed there) then a half tone shot onto sheet film, actually 4 different half tones (CMYK four color separation) then the arc light exposure onto printing plates, the proofs, the assembly etc. The actual visual appearance of each of these stages was beautifully displayed side by side. They are all the same image, are they not? Just in a different language? Solid, liquid, gas... It's all H2O. I had come out of a graphic novel background after all, so the idea of multiple images side by side made a kind of instinctive sense to me.

 

The drafts have changed slightly over the years. I tend to use markers now rather than Dr. Marten’s. I use about six different brands to get colors just as I prefer.  I have added more values (and so more colors) I create my marker drawings in just the same way as I do the stippling drawings. There is one difference. The markers are much better at rendering a range of darks and stippling is better at rendering a range of highlights. I think of these two processes as just slightly different ways at getting at the same thing: breaking down visual reality into a decipherable system that can be reproduced. Scan, a series of drawings I did in 2014 was meant to be both a demonstration and expression of precisely this.