TATTOO DETOUR: 12
HONOLULU DRAWINGS 2018
POSTING IN PROGRESS--Please Check Back
The twelfth year in the
TATTOO DETOUR series, the drawings this year measure 11"
x 14".
Normally when traveling I've been content to walk around, explore and take photos while visiting art museums and galleries -- a method that works fine in New York or Paris when you're there for a week or so. But finding myself in Honolulu for an extended stay in 2007, I realized that Waikiki is a different animal altogether, relentless as it is with the shirtless men who are my muse, not only on the beach but in the restaurants, grocery stores, hotel lobbies, even on the bus. So I was tempted to go further than my normal mode and try to have a studio at the same time, namely a sketchpad and a handful of pens I was carrying around, creating a body of work out of a suitcase while living in a hotel room.
Drawing on the aforementioned beaches, and in the same restaurants and hotel lobbies, I was able to enjoy a completely different rythmn of work than I've ever known at home, at the same time surrounded by people who occasionally wandered over to look at what I was up to so long at my favorite Starbuck's table or on some bench in Kapiolani Park, or under a palm tree. And the setting of an extreme tourist spot such as Waikiki posed the enjoyable task of trying to reach beyond the predictable cliches of surfers, babes and palms. The resulting drawings are conflations of those very surfers, palms, tattoos, military guys, pigeons, lobby furniture, waves and restaurant tables, offering intersections between the surf of Hockney, Picabia, Pettibon, Guston and Westermann, fact and fiction.
As I did in 2015 when I took comic character Dennis the Menace to Honolulu to help out with the drawings, in 2017 I've brought along American painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) to inform the body of work, inspired by my research of Hartley's own work in preparation for my solo painting show at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor. Some drawings capture Hartley's image from historic photographs, while others quote figures from some of his paintings, while still others use his landscape images as settings for a select cadre of Waikiki surfers. Enjoy!
