This is a drawing that I would’ve done in Buffalo – the first, no the second year that I was there. Yeah, that’s right, this was done in the second apartment that we had. I had my grandparents’ big metal desk that I used as a drawing table and I was drawing largely from source materials on 18 x 24“ paper, but I don’t know what the source materials for this drawing were, and I’m sure that not all of these images were from source materials – some are just out of my head. 

The figures on the right are clearly self portrait-ish, or autobiographical-ish – autobiographical-adjacent perhaps, but still a bit mythical. The figures on the left – there’s an angel and what I imagine as an old blind man and they – again – seem likely to have been drawn from sources, but I don’t know what the sources were… sort of symbolic/metaphorical, the kind of images that I would’ve been playing around with at that point. The central nude seems sort of like a stock pose to me from that time. So I’m not really sure what was going on with this, but I can remember sitting at that desk and doing this whole series of colored pencil drawings on the 18 x 24“ paper and, at that point, really colored pencils was still a fairly new thing to me. I mean I had only been drawing with colored pencils for probably three or four years at that point so it was still a tool that I was just kind of exploring.

Update: The title, which I didn’t notice at first, gives me some clue as to what I was thinking with this back then. I’ve written the word, “intangibility” down at the bottom of the drawing and then partially obscured it with purplish colored pencil. The primary instance of intangibility depicted here is the inability for the autobiographical figure on the right to be able to touch the fleeing nude (I’m sure there was a Noli me tangere reference to that – that’s a theme that I would’ve been playing around with a bit back then). There’s also the angel guiding the blind man, expressing the intangibility of blindness – the difficulty of grasping unseen surroundings. There’s a fish leaping – and out of water – and a self-portrait with a horse, I have a tougher time tying those images with the intangibility theme, but that’s the way it goes, you know.