About The Light Drawings
Stoned and bored one evening in 1976, I started making light drawings. I was at home in my tiny, very cramped, Pine Street apartment in Philadelphia where I lived alone, and where I spent too much time. Like my apartment, my life felt small and closed in. I longed for a larger, more open life and large open spaces in which to photograph. I thought, what if I pull the shades, turn out the lights and use a small flashlight as a light source in some way or other; could I create the illusion of uncluttered open spaces? Then, no longer bored, thinking only with my eyes and the motion of my body, I started to make pictures. What I ended up doing was taking off my clothes, opening the camera shutter and drawing an outline around my body with a small flashlight, adding points of light, lines and squiggles here and there around the room. I found the results interesting; a spark ignited, I made more when I wasn't stoned, in a more natural state. The drawing developed over time to outlining other people and objects, both indoors and out; the images started including not just the drawings, but also their surroundings as illuminated by ambient light. The line of light came to represent, for me, a kind of energy, defining the border between persons or objects and nothingness – the inside and outside world. In images of male figures, some nude, I came to understand that the light line represented the sexual electricity we can feel along our skin when physically near someone we are attracted to. Those particular pictures were like a neon advertisement announcing the thrill of my existence as a gay man – and of all gay men. They were a way of coming out. In 1987, with the Scribble series, made while a friend was dying of AIDS and the reality of the disease had set in, the outlining dropped away. I drew freehand with the light. It was if bodies had become pure energy. What a non atheist might call pure spirit.
March, 2013
IMAGE: Self Portrait #6, Pissing, 1977 (detail)