DRAFT

 

The person on the right is my wife Marsha.  The tech and the tech supervisor at her rheumatologist's office are in the midst of a bone scan.  They are about to tell her that she has osteoporosis; but at this precise moment all eyes are on the screen.  What will it say?!

 

I hated being here.  I hated that we felt we needed to be here.  All the individuals involved were decent enough; but they couldn't see the forest for the proverbial trees and Marsha would not get any substatntive assistance with her deteriorating health for at least another 5 years.  And I didn't know that there would be help, of course. In short - I was hiding behind a camera.  I was narrowing my focus and channeling all my interaction with this awful situation through my cell phone camera screen - in much the same way that all the subjects here have chosen to channel their own attentions at yet another screen.  It's perfect that they seem walled in behind a visual jail of vertical blinds.  (Let that word "Blinds" sink in for a moment)

 

This was is 2008 and my cell phone's camera was the sort that took only the most basic photos (50 KB!!)  But the results made the scene look particularly stark.  I resolved then and there that if I ever began drawing again that I would take this project on and do it with the largest possible stippling to emphasize this starkness.

 

6 years later I did.  The dots here are absolutely enormous.  Once upon a time my stippling dots were 0.13mm-0.3mm.  Then I expanded the range up to 0.8mm in the larger pieces like Cast and On Television.  But here the dots are mostly 1.4mm.  There was so much surface tension in the liquid ink that I actually had to leave extra time for drying.  The smear risk was insane!  And I almost got the results that I had hoped for.  The drape of Marsha's clothing was one of my favorite parts.  I also liked that despite the extreme lack of detail that Marsha remained quite recognizable.  What I was NOT satisfied with was my inability to get the images dark enough (one of the pitfalls inherent in the stippling technique).  This was one of the many reasons that led me to try this drawing again but in a slightly different medium. Click ahead to see the subsequent versions.