March 9, 2008

Question: I have recieved over the past couple of months the same question from so many people that I thought I should post a note about it on the journal part of my site.
 
Here is a quote from a typical questioner: "Why did you choose to do the portraits [of Iraqi torture victims] as prints?  Since there are a variety of choices, printmaking doesn't seem like the easiest or most convenient."

Response: I chose to make these portraits as prints for so many reasons.  It never occurred to me that making prints was somehow anachronistic or an odd choice for the project.  In fact, my belief in both the intimacy of a hand drawn portrait, and possibilities that printmaking offers for producing multiples has only deepened.  My goal is to make the sitter and his or her experiences most accessible to the viewer.  Consider the option of photography, and its modern derivative, hand held video.  The glossy finish and mechanical nature of photographic reproductions put more distance between people than we think.   We error when we assume that these mediums have direct access to the truth, and not simply because modern computer programs make it so easy to manipulate almost everything about a photo or video.  Perhaps photographic mediums trap us in the mistaken belief that we see only with our eyes, that somehow reproducing the exact "look" of life defines what life is.  When you draw someone, you don't just look, you translate as best as you can what you see into a motion of your hand making a mark, and then, looking at the mark, you quickly realize that your mark is wrong, and so you look again, and adjust the line.  This is the attempt not just to convey the physical shape of the sitter, but also his or her presence, what they are about, and just as urgently what you are about, all that you think and have experienced.  This process necessarily ends in a kind of frustration, as both sitter and artist can never be satisfied with the drawn result -- the sitter continues to breathe, to move, to age and react, and the drawing just sits there, innate, flat, permanent.

For me drawing, the intimate act of looking at a person sitting in front of me and trying with more or less success to "capture" in some way that person with line and shape and texture is the most honest way to work.  The subject is as aware as I am of the contact – at times a cold and objective visual examination -- and any difficulty between us only makes the process more truthful.  Ease of technique does not interest me unless it provides a benefit. While drawing, I cannot hide my nervous hand, my need to change and correct and alter what I do, my own internal questioning of my merits as a draughtsman.  Drawings and prints for me are the same except the print medium slows me down even more, or, in another way, stops time more precisely, so that an immediate impression becomes fixed, with all its inaccuracies blatant and visible into the plate and then eventually onto the paper with ink.  Of course for this project print multiples allow me to disperse the information in the drawings more widely, so that the stories contained in each print, as recounted in the first person by the sitter can reach as broad an audience as possible.

There is another point to be made about these over-photographed Iraqis and my choice of the hand drawn image.  We are so inundated with photos and videos of everything you can think of, from the good to the bad, the beautiful and the disturbing, that the photo in general is something we can (and do) ignore. Drawings for all their history are always and increasingly a surprise to look at, and that surprise captivates us, -- it is perhaps in the end that they do not look like life that we are drawn into their own very peculiar vocabulary, and made to listen.