A couple weeks ago my friend Don invited me to his office at Columbia College to take a look at the wall across from his desk. He’s been teaching writing there for twenty years and decided his workspace needed a bit of a facelift. His room is in a rabbit warren of similar little rooms for other writing professors. Not much light gets in beyond the slats of the shades and Don assures me the view consists of the never-ending brick of the neighboring building.
The wall in question is currently decorated with a slightly tattered print of Peter Blume’s The Rock; a painting Don claims he doesn’t even like. His initial idea is for me to “go nuts” on the wall itself. But then it occurs to him that he might not be in this office forever and that Columbia would likely whitewash my masterpiece once he’s vacated the premises. So we settle on a more traditional decoration, to wit: a charcoal drawing on a very large piece of paper.
After a few hours of inching back and forth around the Columbia campus via Google Street View, I settle on the intersection of Wabash and Harrison. I print out a few photos for reference, tape a 3’x4′ sheet of paper to my studio wall and get to work. My usual thing when not doing illustration is to work directly from the source, so this project takes a bit of self-deception and trickery to really get rolling. I do best with an empty head when drawing. I want as much of my attention to be on what I’m looking at as possible and thinking just gets in the way. But that is a difficult thing to do when what I’m looking at is a couple of shitty printout photos.
What makes it ultimately come together is that the drawing is big enough that in its various unfinished states, the parts which needed clarification, augmentation, or erasure almost call out loud to me every time I step back from the thing to see what I’m doing. The drawing dictated what it needed and I did my best to accommodate.
I don’t know whether what I’ve made is a masterpiece but it’ll sure beat the hell out of a poster of The Rock. I’ll see how I’ve done when I install it later this week.
p.s. I wrote about a great drawing exhibit at the Art Institute.
p.p.s. RIP Bernice Badauskas. Who’ll call me Mr. Coffee now?