FIGURINES #12: JOANN     Markers on Paper, 27 x 17"

The figure here is JoAnn Tobin, the wife of one of my closest friends from high school.  She is taking a break from eating wedding cake. (Marsha's and mine)

 

JoAnn's overall posture has always made an impression on me.  She leans. She flops across furniture.  She fully commits to big hand gestures.  And she integrates this almost childlike lack of self consciousness within a more fully adult poise.  Here her head falls to the side with her hair flung around.  She is leaning (fully) on the shoulder of the wife of yet another high school friend and her right hand has just swung down from an upward reach that was meant to punctuate a story.  In short, she is dynamic and in motion.  Yet she is also perfectly still and rooted.  The overwhelming pattern on that dress (which was laborious to capture BTW) is what I saw as a vehicle to indicate this "rootedness." At the time I was working on it it reminded me quite a bit of a sheet wall paper.  Mary Cassatt's Japanese influnced prints even came to mind.  Perhaps, that's a bit overly grand! The point was that the dress was both riotously busy in its pattern and at the same time an anchor and root for the dynamic potential being broadcast by JoAnn's posture.

 

At the time I thought that this was one of my more successful marker drawings.  I particularly liked the way that the subtle changes in the darks of the dress indicated light source. Her right hand is a bit abstract but seems to read well at a distance.  I was also quite pleased with the wrist watch. and its extreme hilights. 

DRAFT