I had been quite pleased with the impact that Halloween (as well as its size) had made on viewers in the  Spring of 1990.  So I rushed to continue “Working Big” with The Back.  I had often noted how barbers and hair stylists speak to us by looking not at us, but at our reflections in the mirror.  It makes sense, given the constraints of their jobs; but it seemed a perfect allegory for mediated experience.  Tracy, the woman Marsha had chosen for a major haircut, consented to be photographed and even held a pose or two so I could get the shots I wanted.  

 

Unlike Halloween this drawing was filled with detail.  The debris on the counter and the pattern on the smock were just a few of these chaotic details that I felt very pleased with getting just right; but other, more subtle things - the almost full frontal depiction of Marsha’s features, for example, bother me to this day.  My most significant accomplishment was discovering how to render tiny detail with larger and larger stippling.  Where the stippling patterns in Halloween might have varied from the minuscule to the enormous, in “The Back” they stayed within a consistent range.  This is the drawing in which I first began to think of stippling size in a systemic way. 

DRAFT