Above is a picture from Joyce Mendelsohn's The Lower East Side Remembered depicting Educational Alliance Portrait Drawing in 1918.
Ninety-one years later we have Maria and Ken holding carefully positioned poses which were chosen by my assistant, Irena.
A thoughtfully honed pencil point.
Drawn out of class in Sunset Park.
The drawing above was generated by scratching a rough drawing on trace paper from a mental image and then tracing and refining the base drawing on an overlay. Then I posed wearing a jacket so the drawing from the imagination could be informed by working from the model's pose. Finally the drawing was traced again and graphite transferred to watercolor paper. Sometimes drawings are generated as part of a narrative from memory and other times drawings are drawn from life. This was a combination of the two.
Then the drawing was transferred to watercolor paper and painted and the story was written.
This watercolor was drawn on site in Sunset Park.
Emma Goldman was drawn and painted from a photograph. According to Author Joyce Mendelsohn in The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited, Emma Goldman, denounced as "the most dangerous woman in America" for advocacy of the rights of striking workers, birth control and free speech used to speak in the triangular park at the intersection of Essex and East Broadway known as Rutgers Square or later Strauss Square. Kitty-corner to the Educational Alliance.
This sketch was drawn from life on trace paper as a generative and preliminary study for a painting of people riding on the subway. These drawings were all done by a self-motivated student who started teaching herself to draw and paint with watercolor about a year ago. She didn't go to art school and as a result has no qualms about using figurative drawing and painting to tell a story.
