Tricia is the daughter of high school friend Karen Marinelli-Gomez. Here she is caught in the middle of a back flip off the side of a boat.  “Recklessness and water.” It’s a classic moment - one I can certainly remember from my own youth.  The flip, and what should seem dangerous, is suddenly do-able. Tricia seems liberated from gravity. It was an obvious choice for the Figurines Series and a drawing that would “liberate” her from her visual context.

 

This moment was very late in the day, and the light was coming in almost horizontally. This, and Tricia’s precise position in relation to her dad (who took the photo I worked from) meant that almost all of Tricia’s body is fully lit.  Think of a full moon. It’s the same phenomenon. It also meant that what shadows there were could all be found in the outline.  I have had a decades long aversion to line; but here I could indulge it. (kind of a guilty pleasure) Most of these shadows could be captured ONLY as line. The Medusa like chaos of her hair also appealed.  The composition would not be the same if it were tucked up cleanly in some kind of gymnast’s bun.  The hair is a symbol for the determined abandon of the moment. As I worked on the drawing, observers of the process would sometimes become confused about which way was up.  I imagined Tricia herself might say, “Yeah! Exactly!” I tacked on the words “knows no fear” to the title as that is how Karen, Tricia’s mother, characterized the photo when she first shared it.

 

While I liked the chaos of the hair, I was also somewhat confused by the difficulty of getting a handle on it. Representing hair as individual strands is one of the first No-No’s one reads in classic drawing texts.  Hair is better understood as a sculpted mass - or so they say.  Here this is true in sections; but the whole process broke down into what seems almost random video static.  This makes me nervous; nevertheless, I committed to it - as this kind of breakdown into units is precisely how I think of these drawings.  I have begun to  notice that the parts of photos that are most out of focus and poorly captured are often my favorite parts of the finished drawing.  Here this was particularly true of the feet.