This is an image I had been considering for a long, long time.

 

The scene is on the campus of the University of Chicago. In fact University of Chicago was the drawing’s working title. The well known inhumanity and financial violence associated with that institution’s economics department may have made me briefly attracted to that as a final title. I lived in Chicago for more than 5 years from 1987-1992, but this photo was taken during my first visit to the city in 1986. I was visiting long time friend Jim Forni who had just recently moved there. He tried to make sure the city made a favorable impression on me. In this he certainly succeeded, as I would choose to relocate there within the year. Before he drove me to the airport we spent a few hours wandering through Hyde Park. I remember Jim being dressed in a business suit (to call on clients after my departure) as we walked in the very hot August sun through the campus. It was a bit deserted save for this group of kids who had decided to jump in the lily ponds to cool off. I thought they had the right idea as it was truly sweltering. The stuffy gothic architecture that surrounded this scene seemed a striking contrast to this group’s lack of self consciousness. I took three hurried shots before they noticed us. For years I simply enjoyed the photos as bookmarks of a pleasant memory; but there was something about the little boy defiance in this image that kept me coming back to it.

 

During the years I lived in Chicago I always neglected this as a potential project because I thought it was too plain. At the time I wanted my drawings to be stuffed with media, devices, windows, glasses etc. I wanted some tangible evidence of the visual assault of daily life in my subject matter. Plus I had other projects that took all my time.

 

Still, I kept coming back to it. In 2019 I started to conceive of a series of marker drawings I that I might call Feral Children. I am writing this in October, 2020, and it is still unclear if this will happen. Nevertheless, this image became a candidate for inclusion - with another dozen or so. Originally I had just conceived of this as a kind of Figurines drawing; But then I started to realize that the water was too important to omit. As I was finishing Lauren in the beginning of 2020 I started to feel the urge to do another stippling drawing. But what to choose? What would be worth my time? Because it was certainly going to take a lot of time. Stippling drawings can take between 4 and 8 times longer than marker drawings!

 

I began to think of my last stippling drawing, Median and of the abstract patterns in the dirty windshield depicted there. I found this abstraction almost too overwhelming and very difficult to capture at the time. I was later struck by a comment one curator made about that drawing: that it was a combination of drawing WITH painting. I began to think that stippling might be a  better vehicle for expressing these kinds of chaotic images than markers. It was at this moment that using stippling to depict all the water began to make sense… The very water I had until so very recently been prepared to disregard!

 

I cropped the image to remove all solid ground. I wanted this child to seem to be rising out of water that had no boundary. In my original conception there was something almost primordial and mythic about it. But that little boy is also very specific in his jeans and baseball shirt. I suppose the University of Chicago and its savage economics ideas loomed large in my mind because it seemed just another form of violence or threat that the boy is aping here. Is it a sword fight? Is the broken broom stick supposed to be a Star Wars light saber? I have no memory. It doesn’t really matter. It is the demonstration of a basic human trait: the propensity to use threats of violence. This is “The Stick” as in the proverbial carrot and stick. Many of my more recent drawings have had a streak of romanticism and sentimentality running through them. My older stippling drawings tend to show more of the violence I see in even the littlest things about daily life. This drawing certainly has a bit of romanticism to it but for me the underlying violence matters more. I began actual drafting work on March 12, 2020. This meant that the whole project coincided with the Covid pandemic and, perhaps more importantly, with the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence. As the police precinct in Minneapolis burned it occurred to me that this boy might now be in his early 40s. Yes, this might be a symbol of a child’s trying on adult forms of violence, almost a form of playing dress up. But it could also be a demonstration of a certain kind of defiance/resistance violence. My conceptions of why this was a perfect choice for a return to stippling were not very precise; but I knew it just seemed right.

 

It also made sense for some technical reasons. In my estimation markers are good for defining changes in dark value, whereas stippling is better suited to capturing differences in highlights. Here I wanted to see if I could get at some of the darker values with stippling. The hard shadows on the boy’s clothing meant that there would be many opportunities to try this out. I feel I had some success. But I also realized that to do it completely right would have taken almost twice as long. The most time consuming process was making sure that the dwindling white space/dots in the overworked darks remained relatively uniform and even. I borrowed some working techniques I had seen artist Dara Vandor use in some Instagram videos. She uses stippling as well but chooses to work up the under-layers of dark by doing  very finely spaced crosshatching and coming back in to do the final fill. She uses markers so it is kind of a different medium; but her technique proved useful here. There are a few places where the cross hatching remains visible but by and large it has been covered over. I am not certain that I would ever want to achieve darks in this way again mostly because I doubt that the quality of the results are worth the time. If one looks closer at my older drawings it is noticeable that the dark areas are a solid black. The hardness this creates can give the work a more finished look from a distance, but it feels kind of like cheating.

 

I had a bit of a supplies crisis in the midst of the project. Other artists who work in this technique (there aren’t that many) tend to use certain brands of fine liner pens. They are very fine felt tipped markers that have the ability to give very consistent dot size. These pens, however, come preloaded with the proprietary inks. I generally find these inks to be inadequate. I want my black pigment to be a dark, dark, light sucking black that really stands out against the white of the paper. BTW the paper I use is a cotton rag that is not perfectly white. It reads as roughly R251 G254 B254 in RGB. So I need my black to pop! This is why I choose to work in technical pen. I can choose my inks. The bad news for me is that technical pen is a dying medium. The supplies are hard to find. Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph dominates. But their ink is a kind of wimpy silver off black. I think the chemicals that prevent it from clogging also make it read light. Check out Reach to see an example of this lightness. One of my favorite inks is no longer made. Another is very difficult to locate. In 2014 I discovered a very cheap ink made by Techno-Art/Isomars that was incredibly black. I used it in Scan and Median and began to use it here. One draw back is that this ink clogs constantly. It is very frustrating. And to my horror I found that all my boxes of it had gone bad (think of a sauce “breaking” in cooking.) It seems this brand is all but gone now as well; but fortunately I did find a few boxes at the last moment that had to be imported from Europe. If I had not been able to find these boxes then the right half of this drawing would have been done with a different ink from the left. 

 

The notions of violence, BLM, childish defiance, primordial, mythic… all that stuff was in my mind during this project; yet one of the biggest take aways for me had nothing to do with these issues. As time goes by I find myself more and more consumed by the belief that our visual lives are an unreality. What are we looking at? The “closer” one looks the more it all seems to break down. And don’t get me started on absolute reality of color! The swirl of the waves and ripples on the water seemed to have such an unreality as I tried to sort them out in my draft. I may not have achieved all my technical goals with respect to darker value here; but I did feel that my choice of stippling as the means to represent this breakdown was the appropriate technique.