Once a month Marsha’s nurse arrives to draw blood for testing.  I then hop in the car and drop off the tubes at the nearby lab.  Carrie (left) and Julianna (right) are two of the three people who run this location. Over 2014 and 2015 I surreptitiously took hundreds of  photos of them. But this particular pose really jumped out at me. Their computer is really not that big; the wide angle lens and camera position just make it look that way.  I also liked the somewhat claustrophobic environment. Carrie and Julianna seem sandwiched between the screen and that wall filled with binders of regulations that govern their work place.  One can almost sense the weight of their responsibilities. The composition here reminds me a bit of Annie and Wilma in the photo for Figurines #2: Reception.  Here, I particularly liked the way that sight lines of the two women cross.  Like Wilma and Annie in “Reception” they are competing for the same work space (I really like Carrie’s reaching) and, while they are engaged in the same project, they are looking at completely different things.  They are in fact looking at two different representations of this same project: the hand written lab requisition form and the computer generated record. 

 

The riotousness of the drapery was fun to do. I had to laugh to myself whenever I thought of how a Renaissance painter (obsessed as some were with showing off their skills in the folds of cloth)  might have confronted a lab coat or a paper phlebotomist’s gown.  I decided to keep the script of the uniform recognizable. “Quest” and even the name “Carrie” (a pun on “carry”?) seemed like good, hot button words.  The blotchy formica of the counter top worried me.  Ultimately I decided to recreate its inchoate qualities rather than changing it (as I had briefly considered) to a more uniform flat value.  The result is a bit dark and may have contributed a bit more chaos to an already busy drawing.  The keyboard, the dark darks of the computer and Julianna’s hair are for me the most successful elements. The preliminary draft process was very long (almost 70 hours).  Keeping the final sets of values of disparate areas balanced was probably the greatest challenge.

DRAFT