Harold's Sketchbook

I started these sketches in the waiting room at my doctor’s office a while ago, sitting there thinking about what a crisis our nation’s health care system has become.

Later I kept adding to the drawings, so it’s kind of become a series.  I’ve been thinking about some of the narratives I’ve heard from people about their experiences with health care, and how it has affected their lives.  Some of these stories are from people I know personally, and others I’ve read in the news.  I started writing fragments of these different “broken narratives” down in my notebooks, and then adding them to the drawings.  One day I heard someone call President Obama “Dr. Obama” and it suddenly occurred to me that, for many people he is kind of like the “doctor” that everyone hopes will be able to heal the “broken system” that we have now.

Whatever one thinks about the healthcare debate, one thing seems certain:  the present system is not really working for many of us, and it can’t continue.  Whether we manage to come up with a single-payer healthcare plan, or some other public option, or some radical overhaul of the existing setup, something has got to change.  It seems like we’re all sitting in the doctor’s office, “waiting for Health Care Reform,” and at the risk of sounding naive,  I  am hoping that President Obama will turn out to be the “doctor” that can make the necessary changes happen.

The drawing of Mr. Paulson was done today from a photograph made by Dennis Cook of the Associated Press.  The one of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was done from life at the New York Hilton in November of 2006.

YellowFever is a duo from Texas; while I was checking out the Dan Graham show they came in to play one of the Friday Night “Live At The Whitney” concerts; I had to watch from above the stage on the balcony because the space was packed and the museum guards wouldn’t let me draw while standing on the stairwell.

People lining up at the Whitney entrance:

Visit Harold’s Sketchbook at www.haroldgraves.com

The New York Times this week featured an engaging article by Michael Kimmelman about the once ubiquitous activity of sketchbook drawing.  Mr. Kimmelman notes that travelers “who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint — to record their memories and help them see better.  Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look.”  Taking the time to slow down and consider one’s experience is an essential part of keeping a sketchbook, and indeed it seems rare to find people actively drawing this way as a regular practice any more.

Drawing has always, at least until recently, been a fundamental basis for most other creative pursuits, whether in architecture, painting, sculpture, or costume and fashion design.  Even dancers have been known to work out difficult choreography with a drawing.  Botanists, anthropologists, archaeologists, zoologists and a whole spectrum of people engaged in “scientific” pursuits made drawings as part of their practice of scientific observation.  Think of Lewis and Clark, recording flora and fauna in bound sketchbooks that they carried with them on their long, adventurous trek into a new world.

Michelangelo, who made this drawing a few years before his death, was asked by a younger man for advice about how to proceed in becoming an artist.  The story goes that the old master’s response was simply, “draw, draw, draw.”  Compared with our 18th and 19th century forebears, touring the continent with their baedekers, pencils and watercolors in hand, we are all probably suffering from technologically-induced attention deficit disorder.  Perhaps my own need to keep a sketchbook handy is an attempt to cure myself of this illness, or to at least create a buffer of sorts that might hold the disease at bay for a while.

One of my sketchbook entries from the recent Caillebotte exhibit at the Brooklyn Art Museum:

During a bicycle ride through TriBeCa today, I came across some Bastille Day festivities on West Broadway, where a large crowd had gathered to play petanque on a sand court set up for that purpose in the street.  There was a brass band playing music and a petanque tournament was in progress when I arrived, in front of the Cercle Rouge Brasserie, a French Bistro that is apparently named after the 1970 movie, Le Cercle Rouge.

This Petanque player’s energy was an amazing thing to behold; my drawing does not fully convey the intensity of his focus as he took his position to make his shots.  The other players were much younger than him, mostly college kids, jostling each other and laughing, their energy loose and scattered by comparison.  This man became completely rooted to the ground when he lined up to shoot:  his gaze penetrating and precise as he bent slightly at the waist, his right hand poised for a moment like a discus thrower in an olympiad.  I could almost feel the line of force radiating out from his face across the court.  He was good, too:  his boule frequently landed within an inch or two of the jack.  After finishing a round, he would take a drag off of a little cigarillo before casting the circle for the next shot, saying nothing the whole time.  Petanque, I recently discovered, actually means anchored feet.

On 10th Avenue and 20th Street, right on the edge of the Chelsea Art District, this accordionist was busking on the corner, his back turned towards the avenue, facing the parking garage that sits nearby.  I noticed him as much for his outfit as his music:  he wore a helmet modeled after a Star Wars character the entire time that he was playing.  He would not remove the helmet even to wipe his face (it was a bit warm outside), but instead would deftly lift the mask partially away and run his hand underneath:  I wondered if perhaps he was trying to conceal his identity.  At one point he began playing a Philip Glass theme that I recognized, then segued abruptly into La Marseillaise and the theme from Star Wars.  He was still there when I rode by again an hour later, groups of art tourists walking by tossing money into his open case.

During my regular visits to Prospect Park, I usually bring my sketchbook and inks in my bicycle bag.  Here are a few brush drawings I made of the trees there:

My most recently published “artist’s book” is Buildings and People.  This one is mostly drawings of my neighborhood here in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and a few street scenes in Manhattan, plus some drawings of my fellow subway riders.  You can buy a copy of Buildings and People at this great little boutique called Serimony in Brooklyn on Court Street near 3rd place.

I made these quick studies from two of the paintings by Alice Neel that are currently on display at David Zwirner’s gallery in Chelsea.  Neel is one of my all-time favorite painters; it would be hard for me to imagine American art of the last 50 years without her.  She was a visiting artist at the University of Iowa just a couple of years before she passed away; when I was a student there in the late 80’s, people were still talking about her as if the High Priestess of Painting had been there, and rightly so.  She is certainly one of the great modern masters of portraiture, along with Francis Bacon, Picasso and Lucian Freud.

Neel is one of the few artists to invent a figurative language that manages to have resonance in the modern world.  But she paid a price, just like nearly anybody else who cared about drawing and painting the figure in the last half of the twentieth century:  after Abstract Expressionism became the lingua franca of modernism, Neel and others who took portrait painting seriously spent much of their careers in relative isolation from the rest of the “art world.”  The recognition that she received towards the end of her life was well-deserved, if more than a bit late.

If you go to the exhibit, plan to take some time to sit and watch the video documentary that is showing there as well; it was produced by her son, Andrew Neel and has some interesting footage of Alice and others who knew her, and includes several engaging interviews.  This is a museum-quality exhibit and well worth the time.  This week is the last chance to see it in person; the show ends on the 20th.  Here’s a link to David Zwirner’s gallery for more information:  www.davidzwirner.com

Visit Harold’s Sketchbook at www.haroldgraves.com