Another Fourth of July...

I spent my Sunday attending a figure drawing session in Los Alamos, a town one hour North of Santa Fe where they've designed and built nuclear weapons for about sixty-seven years. It's a small mountain town that every time I visit seems to resonate a strange and ominous energy in my chest and ears. The majority of the cities population is employed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which has a total staff of somewhere around twelve-thousand five-hundred people. One lady drawing with us had worked at the Lab for over twenty years.

I drove up from Santa Fe through rain and snowfall at around nine in the morning with fellow artists McLean Kendree and Sean Closson in tow. I spent my time drawing multiple sheets of paper until around three in the afternoon (with a one hour pause to devourer some lunch and coffee). This image is the sketch I devoted the most time to. It's interesting to see our (predictably) different interpretations of the same model in the same pose.


Around one to one and a half hours, 11" x 14" Wolffs-Carbon pencil on white Rives BFK.