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..

 

Your Back

Sexycoy.

Androgynously Beautiful at play, on a GaydayMayday.

gloves on a Song sung wan

(blackonblackonwasteonlegs)

Your Backspride Backside is

An Inspiration, a Lesson to

Us All.

Waiting to be found in

Shopping Line, lopping fine on your Time.

You make the Room come Alive, going to

the Party that you Already Are.

     What compels people towards anger and ridicule at the sight of someone 'other'? Someone whose appearance goes against their own instincts of 'good taste', or even more fundamentally, someone whose choice of clothing, lifestyle, even essence of being does not readily harmonize with what they themselves can understand?
      What deeply rooted insecurity makes it so difficult for people to sit with a vastly complex world at large? A world in which infinite energies, aesthetics, religions, spiritualities, shapes and sizes of species co-exist? The older I get, the more I realize how these differences need to be acknowledged, celebrated..at very least accepted with kindness for our own well being--for our own wholeness to emerge.  

Tattoo.
Hourglass Figure from Behind.
Cart full and empty at the same Time, leaning to the Side.
You've earned your shopping Gait.
stop and Wait.  
Lean to the
Side ponytail, still and graceful.
Against metal is the flesh of a Human being.
That's All, with some Ink to sustain a
Lifeline.