At the time I referred to Svetlana and Shirley as the Apron Figurines. The subject here is Svetlana Sazdovska, my colleague at Scarpetta. The subject photo was a snapshot. 

 

I was well placed in an alcove of the restaurant coffee station to watch a frank interaction between Svetlana and fellow server Victor Bulat. Victor and Svetlana had worked with one another for years - and in at least two other restaurants before this one. Being direct with one another was never a problem for either. Svetlana had just entered the kitchen and was in the midst of a disagreement with Victor over which of the two of them would have to address some imminent, unpleasant task. 

 

I have unfortunately since lost all the outtake photos of this conversation. Suffice it to say this pose was not like the others. This photo caught Svetlana in the process of turning away from Victor at just the moment that made her look almost serenely resigned. Svetlana had a reputation within the restaurant of forcefully not suffering fools gladly. And this forcefulness was something that she could bring to bear on getting just about any job done efficiently. But there is another aspect of our service professions that is not as easily captured. It is the ability to accept the public’s nastier expressions of impatience and dissatisfaction without in turn becoming bitter and hateful toward one’s fellow man. I thought I saw a flash of this seeming serenity here. It is a hard quality to describe. I sometimes think of large birds who can hover in intense winds with little or no effort, simply angling their wings to catch an updraft. If Robert Longo was going to throw objects at his Men in the Cities subjects to create those twisting poses, I was going to let mine simply hover and finely balance here. 

 

The face was hard to read in the subject photo so rendering needed to rely on very, very few well placed marks. Still it did not prevent me from showing the mole on Svetlana’s cheek. Much of the drawing is nearly black. The darkest areas are lowest and the overall composition grows lighter as it continues up. In my mind I compared it to a candle, the hair and head being the flame. Getting a scanned image that captured these dark value subtleties was very difficult and I’m not sure what is shown here is entirely adequate. This is one of those drawings that really does come off better in person. As I have grown into using markers over the years, I have realized one of their virtues is creating visible differences in these very dark values. I really took advantage of that here. The vest may be my favorite. I like the way that the pockets register as well as the way the whole vest is just slightly lighter than the apron.

 

Throughout most of 2015 and 2016 I had been producing Figurines that had 27 inch vertical dimensions. They fit conveniently on the 22 x 30” sheets of Arches paper I use; but I eventually started to become interested in working larger. Bigger images can create a bigger impact; but that wasn’t what motivated me. I wanted to draw attention to the way that shapes of uniform value started to announce their unique abstract shapes. The rendering of the darks here was successful; but the rendering of detail was much less successful. I have been wrestling with the notion of detail for almost the entire time I have been an artist, and the precise level of it here (or lack thereof) made me begin to think of it a bit differently. I can blow up the image and highlight my new acceptance of less detail; but at the same time I can now also grasp ahold of a different kind of detail: the details of the random marks that make up fields of value. I don’t think at this moment I foresaw the turn toward abstraction and pattern that would come about in later drawings like Picture Books and The Floeter Five. But I think I can trace the origin of my thought process to this drawing.