Oil Pastels on Brown Paper (1980-90)

Sam Koch once paid me the huge compliment of noting that everything he knew about drawing he'd learned from watching me and Cathy Irwin in Mary Ann Currier's Life Drawing class the semester we were all out at the old Louisville School of Art. I came right back and told him that everything I knew about color had come from him. It was true. While with my earliest paintings I'd followed my mother's lead, laying pigment on thick and pure with only a palette knife (mostly because I had no clue how to use brushes), by this point my canvases were basically turpentine washes. The technique was one of economics--I had to make my tubes of paint last forever because I had no money to buy more. Turpentine wash over pencil underdrawing make for some rather muddy tones. But then we'd wind up over at Sam's house where he'd roll a fat one and feed us and show us his new drawings. Sam would just sit around his house and get stoned and then do these amazing drawings using oil pastels and the brown drawing paper leftover from LSA. They were incredibly brilliant and colorful images, simply interiors of his house, just what he saw as he sat there, often enough including his cat. I scraped together a few dollars for my own 24-count box of Cray-pas--I had a mess of the leftover brown paper myself--and roared out of the starting gate. Color, oh beautiful color! It was a grand medium for a number of years, until I began to run low on the brown paper. I didn't like the way the oil sticks looked on white paper, and I could never find any art supply store that sold anything approximating that cheap brown kind. In the late '80s I picked out the best of my art school sketches for fixative, then used a cloth to wipe the charcoal off the rest of the sheets and used the back sides. A full decade along, even that supply was exhausted. Following is the fairly complete record of this body of work, arranged chronologically.