I sought relief from the machinic bounds of my software practice in figure drawing — an immersion in the organic. Charcoal drawing is messy. The human body is an infinitely fascinating and diverse source of forms to study, feelings to have, and meanings to contemplate. In the 20 weeks at 23rd Street Studio, Michael Markowitz exhorted us to focus on feeling, encouraging a drawing practice based in instinct and authenticity. It was a struggle, not just with my clumsy hands, but to focus my conceptually oriented mind in a different way. And, well, I have these drawings to show for it.
But as I look at them, I wonder ... How does figure drawing mediate the perceptual intimacy of nudity? What sorts of displacements are present within aesthetic judgement? What does it mean to utter the word “beautiful”? What is the relation between beauty and desire, or between desire and gesture, or between desire and art — all the psychoanalytic apparatus of sublimation cascades down and inhabits my gestures. The naive marks on the page hold in them — and are shaped by — this psychic maelstrom. They correspond to that, even more than they do to the model's form. They are something like the implications of the model’s form. They are a meeting on the page — a “consummation” — if that is not obscene — of different lives, different forms, different habitations of worlds.