6 year old Sammy was my next door neighbor in 2008.  She spent most of her time playing outside with the other older kids on our street.  Sammy had a seemingly boundless reservoir of energy and she often displayed that remarkable ferocious assertiveness that can characterize some prepubescent girls.  One day I came across her racing about with a toy rubber skull mace.  It seemed an interesting contrast with her ballet outfit. At first she was completely unselfconscious when I asked her to pose for me. She held up not only the skull mace but also an enormous ripe peach from which she had just taken a few bites. After a few moments she seemed to decide that hiding the peach behind her back was preferable, thereby defacto prioritizing the objects in her hands.  

 

It had not been my explicit intention to make this my focus; but Sammy was my third in a series of drawings in as many months of young girls (Calle Alexander in Discovery of Water and Jessica Blue in Lawn Chair).  I did, however, explicitly intend for Sammy to be a companion piece for the Figurines drawing that I was to work on next, Carolina.   

 

Quite often I have fudged the extreme values of my source photos in the interest of creating “balanced” finished drawings.  Here I instead decided to allow the photo’s actual values to take the drawing into more explicitly dark territory.  (Sammy had been standing in the shade of a tree) The result was that what might have been just a cutesy portrait turned into a slightly more unnerving image.  I am a bit unsure about the purely technical aspects of this decision but I liked the dramatic atmospherics that emerged with it.  The handle of the skull mace and all its mini skulls were challenging.  I was forced to again work in that more intricately detailed way that had characterized much of my earliest work.

 

 

DRAFT