DATE COMPLETED: FEBRUARY 28, 1986

TOTAL HOURS WORKED: 70

During the early part of 1986 I became briefly obsessed with the peculiar faux wood block images that The Wall Street Journal then used instead of photographs.  Was it a coincidence that they looked like the images on money?  Did styles of representation have connotations?  Were there recognizable equivalents of visual typeface?  Was there such a thing as a neutral visual style? Part of my increased use of stippling was an attempt to make neutral my own inherent style.  I even briefly tried to manually reproduce the half toning of commercial offset printing. The kinds of seemingly simple drawings in traditional dictionaries were another example that caught my attention.  The lower image here is a reproduction of the illustration that accompanies Webster’s definition of cable.

 

The woman in the image is Jessica Montgomery, my former long time girlfriend.  I may have had an elegiac urge to focus on Jessica at this moment immediately after the relationship’s dissolution.  But I also remember wanting to try out my newly discovered skill of drawing persons on someone with whom I had been more personally close. I was still very much fetishizing the notion of visual circumscription.  The idea that Jessica’s “asleep” visual experience was a self contained visual world within the larger visual world had been my primary thought.  The “cable” and the Russian nesting doll like qualities of its various layers were my idea of visual metaphors for the subject’s experience.  Plus, the stylized representation of the cable was also a stand-in for the internally generated visual experience of the sleeper/dreamer.

 

None of this was remotely obvious to anyone; but it made for a provocative juxtaposition nevertheless.