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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!

 

 


 See all of the
TATTOO DETOUR series
       
               
xx

TATTOO DETOUR 16
Drawings from Honolulu
2023

TATTOO DETOUR 15
Drawings from Honolulu
2022

TATTOO DETOUR 14
Drawings from Honolulu
2021



TATTOO DETOUR 13
Drawings from Honolulu
2019


TATTOO DETOUR 12
Drawings from Honolulu
2018


TATTOO DETOUR 11
Drawings from Honolulu
2017
 
               
               
 

TATTOO DETOUR 10
Drawings from Honolulu
2016


TATTOO DETOUR 9
Drawings from Honolulu
2015


TATTOO DETOUR 8
Drawings from Honolulu
2014


TATTOO DETOUR 7
Drawings from Honolulu
2013


TATTOO DETOUR 6
Drawings from Honolulu
2012


TATTOO DETOUR 5
Drawings from Honolulu
2011
 
               
               
 

TATTOO DETOUR 4
Drawings from Honolulu
2010


TATTOO DETOUR 3
Drawings from Honolulu
2009


TATTOO DETOUR 2
Drawings from Honolulu
2008
  
  

TATTOO DETOUR 1
Drawings from Honolulu
2007