Burdens was the product of yet another photo shoot at the restaurant where I worked.  Cocktail waitress JoAnne Ulibarri, whose extremely long uniform skirt seemed a useful visual device, agreed to pose during the waning hours of the Sunday brunch shift on Memorial Day weekend.  The goal had been to capture a figure caught between focusing on the Remanco POS computer system (that ran the restaurant) and something else - her tray, something over her shoulder, her glasses etc.  Ultimately the computer proved just too small to register in the way that I had hoped. It looked like a complete failure.  In almost the very last shot JoAnne struck a pose that captured precisely the divided attention subject I was looking for.  Her “burdens” were the full tray of drinking “glasses” - marked by negative space; And the reading “glasses,” also on this tray, were a kind of tongue in cheek joke.  Part of one’s burden is one’s point of view symbolized by the eye glasses.

 

The hard edges that I had been using in the shading of the previous Figurines starts to soften up here. The hair is a particularly good example. The eye glasses remain one of my favorite things about the drawing.  My overall opinion of “Burdens” - more than my opinion of any other drawing - has changed significantly over the years.  At first I thought I had failed in capturing what I had wanted to.  Yes it was always a good anchor for the whole Figurines series.  But in recent years I have come to appreciate that it turned out to be far more than just a clever design piece.