Mailed to Héléne Lagache.
Most of the portraits that I draw are inspired by a bunch of images that I salvaged from an encyclopedia that my great aunt was going to throw out. I love the way that the portraits are used to mythologize people - the cock of their head and the glint in their eyes are meant to make them look grandiose and memorable.
Of all the images that I tore out the books, the vast majority are old, white men. There are a handful of women, and almost no people of colour. Or - in some ways even worse - the few images of people of colour are meant to be merely ethnographic, and don't bother to identify the people in the images. It really bothered me that an encyclopedia - which is devoted to canonizing people by identifying them and placing them in a historical context - would dismiss whole swaths of people as not deserving of being named and identified.
Normally I don't identify the people in my portraits. I am more interested in their appearance than I am their identity. But in this case, I felt the need to hilight the racism that underlied the decision not to identify this man in my image source.
Mailed from Montreal, Quebec.
9:38 PM
Wow, fascinating comment. It is telling how much can be said by saying nothing at all...
Love your technique, by the way - do you try to draw without taking the pen off the paper?
10:55 PM
Too true... there's something about having loads of 'anonymous' people of colour that really bothers me.
As for the technique - I don't try to draw without lifting the pen from the paper, rather I try not to control the direction of my line too much and to avoid straight lines. The best I can do to explain it is to call it scribbly. I scribble, and as I add on layers, the image starts to emerge. It's not about the weight of the lines but rather the quantity of lines.
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