Sunday, December 24, 2006

Self Portrait of an Old Friend as a Young Man (1982)











This young man was drafted into the U.S. Army in the spring of 1969, went to Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic in January of 1970 and returned on December 8, 1970. Each day he was in Vietnam he wrote a letter to me, sometimes including drawings and photographs. Each day he was gone, I wrote a letter to him. In this drawing from a photograph he sent to me, I portrayed him as a man who could carry the weight of darkness and light in impossible situations. In Jungian terms, he is my animus.

Unlike the previous chalk pastel life drawings in this series, this one was done by projecting a slide onto a piece of drawing paper and tracing the image. Using that technique to produce a image was a drawing class assignment. I thought of the technique as "cheating." I can't take credit for either the drawing or the photograph from which the drawing was done, only for reproducing an image from 1970 from the war in Vietnam.

It's Christmas Eve in this season of holidays, holy days.

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