17 Books: Part One
Peg Luciano
Peg Luciano
In 2010 I pulled out a large number of brush and ink drawings I had made years before. I looked at them. I reworked some, discarded some, and began to sort and sequence the ones I kept. Some of the sequences seemed to have a kinetic feeling. Some had a mood. It was interesting work but I still didn’t know what to do with them. But I had been making books of photographic sequences for some time and thought perhaps books of drawings…
I xeroxed the drawings at 50% and made accordion book mock ups. Then the original drawings needed to be scanned. Some were drawn on a white paper, many on a clay coated paper printing paper called Basingwerk which was a pale ochre color. I learned a lot in photoshop, creating borders around the drawings on white paper and adjusting and shifting the colors for the drawings on the too yellow clay coated paper. Over the next two years I made 17 books, each in an edition of ten.
Part I - The Drawings
I wanted to draw a person dressing and undressing. I found two other artists who were interested in my idea and in sharing a model.
The Woman Who Liked To Play Dress Up
The Woman Who Liked To Play Dress Up
I had drawn Peg before so proposed the idea to her. I asked her to do whatever seemed natural, to take clothes off, put them on, stop in mid action in various states of dress and undress. She was a wonderful, intelligent and imaginative model. We worked with her weekly for almost three years. Getting to know her over those years became a part of what I saw as I drew her.
The first five of the seventeen books are simply titled, Peg Luciano.
When Peg moved away we found a woman who was an opera singer. I described what we wanted her to do with her clothes as I had with Peg, but she had a totally different take on these instructions. Sometimes she used ordinary clothing, sometimes she brought garments that looked like costumes and she wore them, or parts of them, in odd ways. Inside out, upside down, in strange and comical arrangements. None of it was what we had in mind but it was surprising and interesting so we said nothing — we drew.
These became the next three books. I titled them, The Woman Who Liked To Play Dress Up.
The last three books of figure drawings, Jenny Yim, were made from drawings of a young art student who I drew on my own. I described how I wanted her to pose with clothing and she responded much as Peg had but she was a very different person to draw.
Jenny Yim
Jenny Yim