More drawings from art school days or shortly after, 1967-9. The image to the left is almost sculptural, object-like with the outline & cropping. I later did a few shaped "canvases", actually masonite panels.
The drawing below left is similar to a multi-panel paintng I did, a street scene of business men hurriedly navigating the mean street. I think it was about 4 x 8' in eight 1' wide panels bolted together. The edges were beveled such that they formed an octagon. I tried to set it up around a lampshade pole but it proved too unstable.
I can see the varying influences of other students at the school, Layton School of Art, who impressed me. A visitor commented, when seeing the work near completion, "Man, that's just how it is." The painting came out of all those drawings i'd been doing from my taxi. I'd be trying to get a pantsleg in a certain position, a man walking, & i'd keep looking at different business men in that position to help me get it right. Ended up with all these drawings of men in suits & the larger composite seemed natural to do. Left it in the basement of my last apartment in Milwaukee when I moved out & began organizing an 8 month trip to Europe. On that trip, by the time I got to Spain & Morocco I was seeing some pretty shocking begging. Little did I know that in a few years the states would catch up & surpass, at least in numbers, what I was seeing over there. Bob Darby calls it the abandonment of the poor and the mentally ill.
