TATTOO DETOUR: 18
HONOLULU DRAWINGS 2025
NOW BOARDING...
The eighteenth year in
the TATTOO DETOUR series (since 2007), the drawings this year
measure 12" x 16" and are ink on paper.
While most of the pieces could be considered "regular," a few continue last year's series inspired by the 1951 novel by James Jones, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, set on Oahu at the US Army's Schofield Barracks, and in Honolulu, in the months before and after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
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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 !!
