During the Spring of 2019 I began to get a number of commissions from my colleagues at work. Florencia and Gadū, Dialeysi, Betty, and 5:13 were just a few. I never seem to have enough time to pursue all the projects I am interested in.  I had often resisted commission work as it usually meant that I would have even less time. But something may have started to change in my attitude. Yes, I could get paid. But frankly the money is never enough. And it is not the reason I do any of this. But more important perhaps - I had become more keenly aware of the effect that my work could have on other people's lives. This project I did for my work colleague Ryan Floeter is probably the best example.

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Ryan's brother Sean and sister in law Erin had recently adopted 3 natural siblings from Hungary. It had been a life transformative event for them - and for Ryan and the extended family. They all lived in Hawaii and Ryan lived in Florida so it had been difficult for Ryan to be there in person. Ryan asked me to work on this drawing so that he could send it to send them as a gift. It was to be a kind of formal portrait of the new family and Ryan's participation in the celebration of its all coming into being.

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As is often the case, the subject photo was a nightmare. I realized that I would have to bring to bear every bit of skill that I had learned from Ralph King. The riotous patterns of their clothing may have been the challenge that interested me most.  I had recently become consumed with the idea of blowing up my drafts to near life size so that the random shapes of my drafts could then be more obvious. This was to be a kind of test case. So, yes, I did blow it up quite a bit. I also developed some new and interesting  techniques for examining the subject photo. Enlarging the existing photo produced out of control pixelation and grain, so I started to make screen shots of the unenlarged photos and then blow up these screenshots. I would do this procedure perhaps 2 or 3 times and the image that resulted was often just as distorted but it was also easier for me to determine value.

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The amount of detail in the clothing and the somewhat large size of final  drawing meant that it was a lengthy project. 73 hours!  As I was working on the final drawing I often had the feeling that the project was going off the rails. I tend to work on isolated areas and, in this case, the initial results looked impossibly abstract. I would berate myself that the boy's shirt would never look like plaid when it was done. Would mom's ruffled top ever really come into focus? Dorian, a monster category 5 hurricane was bearing down on South Florida during some of this initial work. I'm sure this added to my overall anxiety about how the project would turn out. What I later came to realize was that what I initially perceived as muddled abstraction was simply my success at showcasing the "dumb marks" quality of the fields of marker value that made up the image. I was achieving exactly what I had hoped by making the drawing bigger. Aside from In Situ this may be the drawing that looks most different when viewed in close up and from far away.

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Perhaps more important the drawing seemed to have some of the desired effect within the extended Floeter family. I particularly enjoyed seeing a photo of Ryan's father engaged in packing it up for shipment to Hawaii. Apparently after its initial arriva, it would often have to be boxed back up so that less than completely clean curious young hands would not gum it up.