my little ones

As I said before I am starting over.  I just moved back to Virginia from Chicago last month and, my word, has it been a bumpy ride.  I've been combing through my sketchbooks from my time in Chicago rereading my apocalyptic  writing and reviewing all of my drawings in way searching for some of my deepest inspirations -- nostalgia and memory.

My current endeavor is to start a zine using two of my father's watercolors as a starting point --

In any case the images that I was working on in Chicago were mostly based on the figure, throughout my entire Undergraduate career as an art student I was trying to, before even figuring out content, find an aesthetic that I believed in and that I thought represented my identity as an artist.  Sufficed to say, I don't think I ever found its root.  The following images were dubbed my little ones and became a sort of comforting way for me to draw my thoughts --

What these little ones say about beheading - I'm not sure, but I do know that if anything is going to crop up in my work again, it will be this kind of image.  They're all drawn in pencil, because it comforts me to know that they are are effaceable.  Also, one of my sketchbooks was completely soaked in a Chicago downpour during a bike ride home from work one day.  This attributes to some of the image quality.

You should probably also listen to Total Loss by How to Dress Well.  One of my top 5 albums of 2012.

 All images in this post are property of  © Derek Blair Cooper