TATTOO DETOUR: 14
HONOLULU DRAWINGS 2021
RETURNING TO DUTY
After skipping Honolulu
in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, it's been a real pleasure
to return in 2021 for this fourteenth year in the TATTOO DETOUR
series (since 2007), A few of the drawings this year re-deploy
images from past years-- a great idea if I'd thought of it while
locked down at home. But still a pleasure, and pursuing an expansion
of technique. All drawings this year measure 9" x 12"
and are ink and gouache on paper.
----------
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.
Enjoy!
