Experience has taught me a Lot.

For example,  I may or may not actively like some of the people I draw, upon meeting them.  They may or may not like me, my work, or even know what to make of what I'm trying to do here.  That's their right, and that's my right.  That doesn't change the love that I put into my work, capturing what I see and feel of each person I've drawn.

It doesn't change the realization that I have no right to judge these people's appearance based on the standards of my own lifestyle.  I have a right to my feelings, but I don't have to act on them or even let them dominate my thinking. This is a very refreshing realization that I wouldn't have been able to  have ten years earlier.  Such a thought has the potential to take a great burden off of many of our shoulders, if we're really open to it.  Why get angry at someone else for having a different story than my own? They haven't punched me in the face, or even said a word in my direction.

There is something incredibly interesting about the photos I draw that were taken in plane view of the subject. You get a different range of energies--joyful performer, defiant, pissed off, and..proud. In moments of my own life I've shared center stage, as well.

     Because our society as a whole has trouble valuing the wider spectrum of people that exist within it, these Walmart customers are being treated like the objects they buy.  peopleofwalmart.com is making huge money off of this kind of ridicule (they even sell books with additional photos of Walmart customers), effectively completing the cycle.  I'm here to break that cycle up through the artwork I create with love and compassion.

Love has power.
It doesn't have to be romantic, all seeing, consensual, conscious.  It just Is.  We give and take of it each time we smile warmly in someone else's direction, or allow ourselves to be helped up by a stranger.  I'm giving it right here and now, breathing it into this project with all my heart and soul.  

A family to feed and not enough Time.  Mother Mary in a shopping cart Wheelchair with Breast exposed.  There's No pose here.  Family and You, One as your son points to something he'd like to buy--to have.  You are Overtaxed and Sad.  No Pad, no buffer.  You Suffer.  Not for your Sins, but for your Living to fight through another Day with low Pay in a Walmart.  Stalwart you Are, so far removed that you Don't even see some jerk take a Snapshot.  It's all worth Pot to you.

Anyway, you've got a Family to feed.

This may be one of my favorites--there is a movement and a grace to this person's shape that I find quite beautiful.  The figure is full, the lean to their right, poetic.

The more I walk around the city after working on this project, the more I realize just how much everyone else looks and feels like the people I've drawn here.  All it takes is a t-shirt.  A curve.  A casual moment.  Any one of us could be any one of them.

     I remember staying at a mental health crisis unit last year.  My depression had gotten bad, and I needed help in getting some basic needs met.  I met a poet there named Jorge, whose first language was Spanish.  He also played the guitar.  Among the arts and crafts materials I found an old magazine featuring Kurt Cobain.  I decided to paint him on some orange, foam-like material.  I had another art project going, too.  Working this way felt satisfying.   Jorge and I were together in the main room hanging out and doing our thing, when Nirvana's 'Come as You Are' came on the radio.  He started belting it out while standing on the couch, singing along quite loudly and happily out of tune as I continued to work.  In that moment I felt empowered.  Kurt would have wanted his music reclaimed by unknown artists and poets in a place as removed and random as a crisis unit, feeding off of the creative energy in the music's essence.  I knew it on a gut level.   We were Alive.
   
     In Jesse Frohman's account of photographing Kurt Cobain, in Rolling Stone, Frohman talks about everything going wrong within the session--Kurt showing up three hours late wearing Jackie O sunglasses, queasy and stoned after the hotel manager told Frohman that he could only take pictures in the hotel's basement conference room.  Yet Frohman also gets at a fundamental truth in his account.     Kurt would not take off his sunglasses, and so Frohman says 'To me, those glasses become his eyes.'  There were photographs taken that Frohman doesn't consider flattering so much as compelling--he speaks of how this series of outtakes becomes one portrait of the man, showing us the movement and expression of Kurt Cobain's body as a whole.  
   
     In creating these drawings of Walmart customers, I'm able to get at the very essence of each individual, simply from the angle many of the original photographs were taken--behind.   It's an awfully low thing to do--sneaking a picture of some unsuspecting person from behind in an unflattering moment.  ..but their essence is still there.  It's in their movement.  It's in their shape.  It's in their clothing, and how it hangs.  It's a moment in time, captured.  ..and just as I felt with Jorge at the crisis unit, They too are Alive.  On a fundamental level, the essence of the art I create belongs not to the photographers, but to these Walmart customers.     I want it that way.

Some time ago, this woman could've been posing nude for some renowned painter instead of being the object of someone else's photographic ridicule.  Now she's the subject of this non-famous artist's drawing.  It's a step in the right direction I think..