Reading grew out of one of those snapshots that I managed to capture by always carrying a camera around during 1986.  My younger brother Andy is the subject; here he is framed by the silhouette of the open kitchen window at the family cottage in Georgian Bay, Ontario.  The drying dishes are partially visible in the foreground.   Again, the subject is wearing glasses; his focus is intensely directed - away from the immediate visual surroundings.  The notion that the subject’s visual experience might be somewhat like the near tunnel vision shown in the drawing frame was why I made the rather unusual decision to include the full black of this silhouette in the final drawing.

The intense sun light of the photo and the resulting hard shadows helped me to move my focus away from capturing object details (the Sunkist logo on a can of soda, for instance) to capturing more true levels of light and dark.  This was also my first drawing done from a thorough rough draft.  All the varying levels - from the darkest darks to the lightest lights - were completely mapped using the psychedelic color scheme.  One can see that I was even trying to capture (unsuccessfully, it would turn out) the little bits of rust in the screening.  During my work on Reading I also briefly started to wear a jeweler’s loop/magnifying glass.  I thought that pursuing increasingly microscopic detail might help the finished drawing.  By the time I had finished this, I had decided once and for all that this was not true.  This is also my first drawing that is entirely stippling.

DRAFT