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Ms Pannell - December 4th, 2010

Mailed to Héléne Lagache.

Most of the portraits that I draw are inspired by a bunch of images that I salvaged from an encyclopedia that my great aunt was going to throw out. I love the way that the portraits are used to mythologize people - the cock of their head and the glint in their eyes are meant to make them look grandiose and memorable.

Of all the images that I tore out the books, the vast majority are old, white men. There are a handful of women, and almost no people of colour. Or - in some ways even worse - the few images of people of colour are meant to be merely ethnographic, and don't bother to identify the people in the images. It really bothered me that an encyclopedia - which is devoted to canonizing people by identifying them and placing them in a historical context - would dismiss whole swaths of people as not deserving of being named and identified.

Normally I don't identify the people in my portraits. I am more interested in their appearance than I am their identity. But in this case, I felt the need to hilight the racism that underlied the decision not to identify this man in my image source.

Mailed from Montreal, Quebec.

2 comments:

Wow, fascinating comment. It is telling how much can be said by saying nothing at all...

Love your technique, by the way - do you try to draw without taking the pen off the paper?


Too true... there's something about having loads of 'anonymous' people of colour that really bothers me.

As for the technique - I don't try to draw without lifting the pen from the paper, rather I try not to control the direction of my line too much and to avoid straight lines. The best I can do to explain it is to call it scribbly. I scribble, and as I add on layers, the image starts to emerge. It's not about the weight of the lines but rather the quantity of lines.


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