I once heard cinematographer Gordon Willis say, "Basically, working in color is a burden."  Uggh! It is.  There has always seemed something far more clean about working in black and white. Perhaps it is the way that the apparent simplicity hides an artist's more radical choices.  Color seems only to lay it more bare.  Anyway, Kiss on the Cheek is my first finished color image.  I had spent the preceding 3 months producing an elaborate draft for what would eventually become Discovery of Water. (also a color image) It had become a hugely over planned project.  I decided to work on this more spontaneous drawing as a warm up exercise before beginning that more ambitious final image.  The draft here was minimal, and most of the decisions in the execution (value, color, blending etc.) were made a la minute in the final drawing.  I chose this particular image precisely because it is simple. The jacket is blue green.  The poncho is gray.  Yes, the hair is a bit busy; but overall there is only so much detail that I could obsess over. It took 23+ hours; but for me this is like a 30 second gestural drawing!

 

The image is positively ancient:  February 11, 1984.  It was the night of college friend Ron Wiesel's debilitating motorcycle accident.  All concerned were about to go home to bed - to return to see him in intensive care the following morning.  It was a moment of great worry and exhaustion.  The 21 year old me (yes, that is me under all that hair on the left) has removed my then girlfriend Jessica Montgomery's beret and so as to give her a kiss.  The kiss didn't make it all better; but it was something.

 

My favorite part of the image is the two scarves and their different but resonant shades of blue.  The rest of the drawing is so diffrent from anything I've ever done that I really have very little perspective on the result.  I threw radically different colors at certain parts and in other sections I instead maintained very narrowly controlled hue variations.  The fact that the markers I use are very resistant to blending has always appealed to me.  (I think I like stubborn things.) But I sometimes wish I could have developed a better sense of how to accomplish blended tones. One can see that I am experimenting with textures in the hairs on the forearm and in the weave of the wool jacket; but, alas, it is not really consistent. I suppose it does in fact look like Jessica and me; but what a chaotic thing!  I suppose my relationship with color had to start somewhere.

DRAFT