This project proved a bit of a departure in technique. This is not a particularly detailed piece so it became a suitable test case for incorporating text within the image. There is a whole history of pop art sensibility that uses typeset and font as a means of referencing commercial context. I have a good friend who can be driven into fits of apoplectic anger over Lord & Taylor’s decision to change their logo font to something that looks like the signage for Wendy’s Hamburgers. He can see the subtle differences and knows that good graphic design can influence the quality of our lives. Text is important in all these ways; but this is not what interested me. I was interested in using letters as just one more variation on my notion of using “dumb marks” to establish value. This is the reason for my history with dots and stippling. This is what later attracted me to the solid paint-by- numbers-esque qualities of markers. Sure it is possible to make more subtle images using media more easily blended: pencil, charcoal, oil paint, air brush, just about anything - except what I do. But I don’t want blending. I want to see the components. So, why not letters? Indeed, why not? Well, for one, they are no longer dumb! A letter’s actual shape is just as “dumb” as a dot's; but it does add that extra dimension. And unlike the text in a comic strip or a graphic novel, the actual letters are fully integrated into the image. I go on about all this just to give some idea why I chose the style of lettering that I did. I wanted it to be about as neutral as I could make it. No image, no mark, and certainly no font is truly neutral; nevertheless, I wanted these kind of associations (Campbells Soup, Lord & Taylor, Wendy’s) to be as “muted” as possible. I wanted whatever “voice” (I seem firmly trapped in this metaphor so I will continue to run with it) to be about denotative word-ness rather than style. Hart Crane is famous for his “illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness.” Yes, this kind of influence interested me. If the word LADIES is partially occluded and all we can read is DIES, we definitely have an impingement. For this reason I eventually rejected the idea of cramming letters very close together to achieve shading -  or in circular or any other non linear format. After considering a wide range of options ( including an attempt at old fashioned cursive writing!) I decided that the arrangement needed to be in the normal horizontal line format. I toyed with the idea of the lines overlapping so that letters became harder and harder to decipher; but the project was not about being deliberately obscure. The text had a definite message and I didn’t want to make it impossible to read - or to give the impression that the message was beside the point. It most definitely was part of the point.

I had three projects in mind for this type of technique. All had one thing in common. One person (in all cases NOT ME) was describing something about the subject. I wanted what was being said to be conjecture, abstraction, or simply just an incomplete summary of that subject. One of my favorite obsessions has always been about how the impulse to make art is inherently corrupt and doomed to fall short in all its iterations - but that it is affirming to do it anyway (Bill Murray’s “It just doesn’t matter!” speech from Meatballs)

EXAMPLE ONE: A friend used to work with a man who was so obsessed with the backhoe they used at the Delmar water department that he used to dig holes and fill them up during their lunch breaks. My college girlfriend some 3000 miles away (who never met this friend or his backhoe loving colleague) wrote a poem about this man based on my second hand stories. Why not compose a drawing of this man from some photo with this poem superimposed? Did my old girlfriend understand this man? Maybe. Something about him - or more correctly, my stories about my friend’s stories about him - something there touched her. It is a bit meta - but I too am touched by her impulse to produce such a poem. The drawing, if it ever happens will be about that.

EXAMPLE TWO: A friend who is a published poet (not this old girlfriend) once posted to social media a blurry indistinct photo of a woman dancing in her stocking feet in an institutional hallway. I have (separately) read my friend’s poem about this very woman. Among other things it imagines the kind of romantic suffering that might give rise to this kind of solitary dancing. Does my friend, the poet know this woman? I am not entirely sure. I have never asked her for details. The uncertainty - as much as anything else - make me want to compose this image (with perhaps even others) with her poem as pictorial text.

We are all trying to get at one another (or in some other cases, I’m sure, run away) What we try is incomplete but not entirely without a certain kind of beauty. The pictures aren’t monuments to the sentiments expressed but rather a recognition of the impulse.

So what is going on with this, the current example?

In February of 2017 Peter Monaghan, a friend from my time in Chicago posted a photo of his mother as a very young woman to Facebook. I had met Jo, his mother, even before I had met him, so I had some context. I had known her as a mother and as an aunt - in short, as a figure of an older generation of a family with whom I had become close. But this particular photo seemed teeming with youthful, unbridled energy. This was Jo full of a heretofore unconsidered (by me anyway!) independent agency. And it got me thinking of the startling power that old images of our mothers can have for us. Before she was your mother (and yes she will always be that) before that, she was already fully formed and an incomprehensibly realized individual. So I turned around and invited my Facebook friends to share some of THEIR photos of THEIR mothers as these kinds of young people.  I was treated to quite a few; but the one that made the greatest impression on me came from Reema Habiby. It was a shot of her mother, Hiam Salloum, at approximately 20 years of age. She was strikingly formally dressed on Beirut’s old seaside Corniche in 1952. And so again, I turned around and shared this photo on Facebook with all my friends. Reema’s first cousin Nabila Aramouni responded in a comment:

“The five Salloum sisters (of whom Hyam is the third) were known in their community in Beirut, as the smartest, and most elegant ladies. Love you my sweetest, kindest aunt Hyam.”

The text seemed almost as striking as the image. I copied them both and thought that one day I might return to them for a project.

Sadly, events intervened. Hiam (Reema tells me this is the correct spelling) died within the next year at approximately age 85. This kind of thing has happened to me before. Josh Piccoli of Last Look had died before I could get around to doing the piece I had always wanted to do featuring him. I have also done a few portraits of recently departed friends and family: Nicole Halpin, Ron Wiesel and Chip Gillespie to name just a few. Sometimes I think that the loss of people we love fixes them in time for us. While they are alive, they are dynamic. They can always come out with less than compassionate things to say or fart loudly in public; but when they are gone they become the province of memory. And isn’t memory the best example of the incomplete understanding of others I had mentioned earlier?

Some details of note: The photo Reema posted was a snapshot of a framed photo. It had that distorted trapezoidal shape that people inevitably produce when trying to frame other images in the viewfinder. Rather than work from the original (which would have yielded a much better quality drawing) I chose to go with the distortion. This is how Hiam came to me. And Nabila (or so Reema tells me) has always spelled her name Hyam. I didn’t change it. I even left the idiosyncratic placement of the comma. This was our collective effort after all and I did not want to take away from anyone’s contribution.

I originally thought I would be able to bang this out in under 10 hours. I don’t think I would have started if I had known how wrong I would be. I quickly found that it would take 3-4 times that long. The technical laboriousness of putting the letters in place - in precisely this way - was a bit taxing. I am writing this the day after I completed it and have no idea if I will continue to work in this way. For someone like me who has been accustomed to chasing detail, it was difficult to let it go. Nevertheless, I find the way that certain things emerge as discernible images out of the chaotic dumb marks to be quite exciting. For instance, the male figure standing in the deep background may be my favorite example. If one moves closer he vanishes completely but re-emerges again as one withdraws.