Drawings, 1982

These drawings are all from 1982. That was my 3rd year of undergraduate studies and about the time my identity as an artist was taking shape. I was 22 years old. 

By this time I already knew I had an innate talent to draw realistically what I saw. I also knew I had a unique ability to draw the human figure. But more importantly, I had discovered an intense passion for making art and studying the work of other artists.  In addition, I had a mentor named Dr. Woodal who held her doctorate in art history focusing on the moderns and was a true believer in the Western Cannon.  

I was especially interested in how artists developed an idea for complex works of art from initial very “sketchy” drawings. You can see in the drawings below a young mind absorbing the lessons of how earlier artists developed ideas. It’s also clear to see how interested I was in telling stories with visual terms including the manipulation of style as a story telling tool. In some cases I was very much aware of what I was doing thanks to the coaching of Dr. Woodal. But in other aspects, I would not understand what I was doing until 20 or even 30 years later.   

One reason these ideas took awhile to develop was that right after I graduated from Penn State in 1983 I moved to Taiwan for 4 years to study Eastern philosophy and Chinese art history. These Eastern ideas would also be deeply appealing to me.  So I had the challenge of a huge appetite. The world all seemed so interesting and there was so much to absorb and process.  

A couple of themes that jump out at me are the ones featuring an artist at work in his studio and of people purchasing something. This dual set of exchanges would fascinate me my whole life. The idea of gifts vs. purchases would be a central source of conflict for me until my early 40’s when thanks in part to the work of a writer named Lewis Hyde I was able to gracefully elide my work as an artist where the central key part… the art… would come to me as a gift and yet I would then sell my art for the best price I could get essentially converting the gift into profit, something that feels inherently wrong to every artist. This tension would drive a lot of my art including the works shown below.   

You can also see a lot drawings of an artist or model looking at a sculpture. Among other things, these early drawings reveal how important sculpture would become to me much later in life.   

There are also a lot of copies of “old master” drawings. I was very interested in how other artists used line, shape, negative space and the use of different kinds of drawing materials. I even became fascinated with the kind of paper or found materials that artists used to make their drawings.    

Moreover, I remember discovering early on that all of my favorite artists at that time including Michelangelo, Rubens, Picasso and Rodin all considered drawing to be most important to their creative process.