This is Lauren Lucash-Saldarriaga, the Training & Performance Improvement Manager at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Lauren and I (as well as dozens of other employees) meet once a year during my 3 hour annual re-orientation. Lauren’s presentation is always engaging. And, while I always take in the content of what she has to say, I am more often captivated by her performance strategy. Yes, Lauren is Human Resources; but she is perhaps one of its most extroverted manifestations. During my 2019 session I wound up taking some 200 plus photos of her to try to capture some of this. Most were just fun snapshots of her ongoing exuberance; but I managed to get one that I thought captured the intersection of performative sincerity and ACTUAL sincerity.

 

Sincerity.

 

I realize that I have been dancing around a number of problematic reactions to this idea of sincerity for decades. Or, more accurately, it is the absence of sincerity. Ironic distance seemed to have taken its place in the public discourse once David Letterman’s brand of snark went mainstream.

 

Here Lauren is being sincere about some aspect of employment within the hotel. (I think it was the non-discrimination policy) But there is something about the intensity and rootedness of her stance that makes it seem as though she might be a symbol for sincerity in general. She had paused under a recessed spot light so that her fingers seemed to be glowing. That her eyes are closed seemed to add to the intensity of expression. The thing in her mind’s eye is of some obvious value to her. And this is what made me drawn to the image. This “THING” is absent. It seems to be in her minds eye. It seems to be as impalpable as the light in her hands. My Figurines series has always been about things not seen. Usually it is something cropped or physically out of the frame. This time it is hinted at not from a physical outline (think the handlebars in Jeff) but the emotion in her expression and stance.

 

One of the unfortunate things about the overhead spot was that Lauren’s face was a bit more washed out than I might have liked. Yes, it adds to the feel of the glow in her hands; but I would have liked to have added some more detail. Getting the balance of the lightness of her face and the darkness of her clothing just right was one of the central challenges. I briefly considered making the image almost life size. I usually increase the size of the final image to 200% of the draft. A life size image would have meant expanding it to almost 400%. Part of why I wanted to do this was to make the highly detailed shading maps of the draft and its edges appear more like random shapes. I had been wanting to give my work this feeling of shape breakdown more and more for the past year. As I work on drawings like this I am often disappointed by what seems like sloppiness in the close up execution. However, as the work progresses I begin to see how this sloppiness starts to seem just right in the larger view. I have been speculating that bigger drawings might be a way of making this detail/big picture contrast more obvious. I may yet do this - but not here. It would have meant purchasing a new EVEN larger drawing board. (No budget and no space!) Plus I did not feel right about making this piece substantially larger than the other Figurines. At 37” tall this one is sort of appropriate coupled with Svetlana.

DRAFT