Art Envy Oil

Another work culled from the archive. Art Envy Oil is comprised of three drawings originally intended for publication as a broadside, to accompany a selection of text by a writer based in Iowa City. Unfortunately, the project never came to be, but these images remain to stand on their own. The germ for the composition was a free-association on the theme of the text that I was to create a corresponding image to. That theme, as I interpreted it, was desire. Namely, the male narrator's desire for a specific woman whose physical attributes, such as her eyebrows and shapely hips, helped to fuel said desire. Around the time this piece was percolating, I was fresh from finishing my graduate studies in printmaking at The University of Iowa, and was preparing to leave Iowa for good, to return to my hometown of Detroit. Subsequently, the completion of Art Envy Oil took far longer than I had hoped. It became the thin thread that held my sanity together as I made the move, took up a couple of teaching positions at a university and a community college respectively, began and navigated a long-distance relationship with a wonderful woman I had met just prior to leaving Iowa, all the while living in my grandmother's basement and pondering my fate in the larger scheme of things. These three pieces served as a very small bridge from the end of my life as a student to the beginning of my life out of the protective womb of academia. None of this was or is intended to find its way into the drawings. My only goal was to hold onto that slippery notion of desire that originally set me on my way. That, and the need to create something a little more graphically assertive, indulging in my love of using brush and ink, and employing black and red. I should note that in two of the panels, the red is slightly "misprinted," that is, jogged a bit to recreate that wonderful "happy accident" of plates not properly aligned on the printing press. In the age of digital correction and polish, I yearn for those "misprinted" color images I devoured in the comic books of my childhood.


Images: Ryan Standfest- 1. Art (air); 2. Envy (novelty); 3. Oil (and cactus felts), all 2006, ink on paper, 14 x 18.75 in. (collection of Violet Lucca)