DRAW ME

      Drawing was my entree into being an artist. I wasn't a prodigy, but I was good enough to get my drawings on the refrigerator and receive plenty of accolades from my teachers. "Oh, that's very nice Michael. Is that a dog?" Then, one day in fourth grade somebody (I think it was my father) took issue with one of my sketches. As I remember it was a battle field scene between wild stick figure Indians and stoic cowboys. The Indians were galloping, attacking across the page on scrawny pencil line horses. In an inspirational gesture I added tiny "poop" dashes emitting from the rears of the Indians' horses. I thought it was brilliantly funny. The old man frowned and pointed out that I had "ruined" a perfectly good drawing. "You are better than that." That wasn't the reaction I was expecting.

    I continued drawing, graduating to painting. My first paintings were small canvas board compositions of wildlife. My technique was Testors car paint applied with cue tips. They were crude primitives with little regard for depth or scale, but the subliminal effects of the paint left me craving more and more time in the basement with my box of cue tips and glitter pink paint bottles. I was going to be an artist. I just knew it.

    By the time I graduated from college in 1977 I had stopped drawing all together. Gravitating towards the more challenging world of video, performance, conceptualism and social sculpture, I didn't know what to draw anymore. Painting and drawing seemed limited and driven by talent and ambitions that I didn't have enough of. When I moved back to New York and opened a gallery as a conceptual art work in the East Village I found myself surrounded by paintings and drawings. My early chops kicked in and I invented a fictitious artist (Kristan Kohl) who drew and painted. Then I exhibited "her" work at my gallery. It was like the critics had listened to my father. "Kohl's paintings seem comments on modes that have already been commented on to death." wrote Vivian Raynor in the NYTimes. Nobody got the joke.

    It would take years before I was confident enough to paint, draw and exhibit under my own name. By then I was an old man. I still wasn't that talented, but the Punk Rock years had taught me that talent really wasn't that necessary in the art endeavor. The key was (like singing and guitar playing) to produce, use the "blues" of "Jazz" model and riff. As long as you did it, you were ahead of the game.

     For the past ten years I've drawn plenty. The series come in fits and starts. When I'm in the zone I can crank out the product. The performative element that allows me to indulge in the process and not worry about "what" I am drawing is liberating. During the early days of the pandemic I embarked on a series I called the Virus Suite. The drawing process got me off the pathological need to check the news every five minutes and freed me from the media's grasp. I turned up the music and drew. Sometimes I would close my eyes and put brush to paper. The series ended a year later with 1000 drawings. 

   A few days ago I started a new drawing series called The Crime of War. The war in Ukraine vibe is identical to that of the pandemic. One feels that if CNN isn't clicked on every twenty minutes you may miss something. It's exhausting. Drawing has become my refuge. Like the virus, war is now clawing at my sub-conscience, and unavoidably spills onto the page. In the end, like all art, you only draw one thing. You draw you. I draw me.