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.