At the beginning of 2020 I started to think about a drawing series I might title Feral Children. Sammy and Carolina had been some of my favorites of the long running Figurines series and I thought it might be interesting to pursue what had been drawing me to this kind of work. I have since come to think of the Feral Children title as something I merely chose to amuse. But there is something to it. There is a directness in the bearing of children. Their emotions can be more easily read. The cuteness that parents and family dote on can more easily slip into honest and sometimes brutal reaction to the onslaught of daily life. To those who have known me a long time I am a variation of the kid in The Sixth Sense: “I see violence. I see it all the time. I see it everywhere.” Yes, I can laugh at myself for taking the time to say such things; but it is true. I do see it everywhere. (I should note that this is NOT the ONLY thing I see) What appeals to me about some of my child subjects is that they seem to have a sense of it too. And what’s more many seem to have a genuine instinct to push back against it. Of course, much of this is because they are not yet socialized. And that word Feral is funny. It has connotations of predation and wildness, ability to lash out if threatened or challenged. But really the mythical feral child is just a human who has developed according to its own naive standards. The violence in a feral child should properly be considered the child’s own not society’s. It is a muddled concept and likely does not deserve an entire series of work devoted to it. Nevertheless,  that is where this piece started.

In 2018 my work colleague Jancel Fabregas showed me a photo of his children on a beach in Hollywood, Florida. I had recently finished Svetlana, a drawing of another of our colleagues. Jancel asked me what the cost might be for a commission. And he had been talking about a large size. I was just then feeling overwhelmed by the almost complete lack of free time in my life. There was no way I could consider this for him at that time. Still, the photo interested me, and I found myself coming back to it again. So when I started to compile Feral Children photos a few years later I included this one. The first prospective Feral became The Stick. The next was Haylee. While the Haylee project was relatively successful, I was often struck by how hideous it seemed. I may have plunged into Kevin and Kaylie as an antidote.

There is a certain grace to the pose of these children. Almost everyone I shared the photo with responded to it that way. Yes, they are cute kids (that helps) But I thought I saw something more in it as well. There is a kind of grimace on Kevin. He’s happy. He loves his sister; but I also sensed a kind of war hero triumphalism in his proud upright stance. Kaylie on the other hand seems a bit unsteady. Well, I suppose she should. She is a toddler after all. The pants are askew. The underwear waste band is showing. Kevin is what is keeping her steady; yet her arms are out. It is a stance that seems wide open to experience. In the middle of working on this I had the chance to ask Kevin what he thought she had been looking at. His response: “I think she is just looking up.” Hah! True enough. Of course, I’m seeing some a variation of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech guy… That’s just me “seeing things” in actual scenes. I could go on. Anyway this scene had me hooked, so off I went - without telling Jancel I was working on it by the way. No sense getting anyone’s hopes up…

Another detail worth mentioning has to do with an unlikely artist: Romero Britto. Britto’s work is everywhere in Miami. It is on the side of apartment buildings, government centers, shopping malls. I mean EVERYWHERE. He has a well coiffed palace of finished work and “merch” with an eclectic number of brand crossovers just blocks from where I live. In fact, "brand" may be the word most think of with Britto. I suspect that there is a deeper aesthetic at work under all his apparently “happy” art. And I suppose there is something to the “happy” that most viewers respond to; however, for me this has always seemed unearned, superficial and trite. It occurred to me that the image I was preparing to work from might be a way to transform some of this triteness into more actual, living, breathing child behavior. There are a few specific Britto images of boy and girl I was responding to. Kaylie’s shirt seemed to pick up where these images leave off. In my world, cartoon love might come with streaks of snot, unfortunate dental situations or dirty fingernails. My version of Kevin and Kaylie were to be the real life versions (with maybe even a touch of "feral." They were to be like Pinocchio as a real boy or Pygmalion’s sculpture come to life.

OK, whatever. Scrappy cute kids!

I had originally planned for the finished drawing to be about 37 inches tall, comparable to Haylee, Lauren, or Svetlana. But I soon became seduced by the abundance of detail in the crisp source photo. I started to notice hems, stitching, eyelashes and many other subtle details. Something persuaded to me to blow up my source photographs even more so that I could really capture this stuff. Instead I began to recognize I had opened up a Pandora’s box of technical difficulties. I was about 20 hours into my rough draft when I realized that the transparency prints I was working from were just too blotchy to read in the darker parts. I thought I could effect better results with slightly different prints. I had multiples made. There were lots of phone calls and emails with the digital lab. Eventually I had to accept that this photo transparency technology would never be adequate for the task at hand; but I had already committed to a huge chunk of work! I could have decided to go back my original size… BUT NO! I had to be stubborn and keep going in this now much more laborious process that would involve computer screens, conventional prints as well as my original runny transparencies. The draft took forever! In fact the whole project took just over a year. I even  almost surpassed my previous record for time spent on a single project. (This is not something to be proud of.)

To even make a draft this big I had to invest in much larger rolls of film (the paper I do the actual rough drafts on). This size change at the draft stage would also mean changes in working techniques for the final drawing. I had to get the largest size roll of Arches paper as well (51” wide). AND I had to get a new, bigger (and heavier!) drawing board! I live in a modest size apartment and moving this stuff about is truly a test. It also meant I would be doing a bit of an about face in working style. In recent projects I had been trying to accentuate breakdown in representational coherence by blowing up the constituent areas of shade in my drawings into abstract patterns. The Floeter Five may be the most extreme example of this. The way I had accentuated the almost fauvist abstraction was achieved by doing small drafts and then enlarging them for much larger final drawings by as much as 250%. The constraints of paper size meant that for this project I could enlarge by only 135%. If I were a painter (I am soooo not that) this might not be a big deal. But for my working technique this is akin to doing microsurgery. Now I would have to get multiple new sets of nibs for my markers as well. If nothing else, this drawing taught me how to use the nib sizes to greater effect.

This was also the drawing in which i decided that I needed to lighten my photo analysis and its translation into marker shades by about 5-10%. My reasons might make for an even longer and more tedious discussion This meant the draft took even longer as I constantly wound up checking that I wasn’t going too dark.

Overall I was pleased with the results. There is something that proved very powerful about the overwhelming size of the piece. However, I did start to get fed up with the limitations of the markers themselves. I have frequently become frustrated that I am not as able to capture texture in as thorough way as I might hope. To this day (11/10/22) Picture Books may be the only marker drawing in which I got the textures I was hoping for. If I continue in this particular working style I suspect I will have to do many more practice drafts and develop variations in working priorities to get the desired textures. Improvising in a medium such as this where one only gets one shot at getting it right has started to seem reckless, especially on a project this large.