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TATTOO DETOUR -- Drawings from Honolulu -- ALL YEARS 2007-2022
(ongoing)
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.
I've been able to return to Honolulu
every summer since 2007 (except --so far-- for the pandemic year
of 2020), so the grid here presents portfolios from each of those
years-- thirteen and counting. In 2015 I took comic character
Dennis the Menace to Honolulu to help out with the drawings, and
in 2017 took along American painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
to inform the body of work. Across all the years of the TATTOO
DETOUR series, the drawings measure either 9" x 12"
or else 11" x 14" and are ink on paper.
Enjoy!
