

PORTRAITS 1971–1972
My portraits of 1971–1972 taught me that faces are asymmetrical. This came as a surprise. Could whole bodies be asymmetrical? I had not only been drawing from the nude since the age of 16, when I took a course in Life Drawing at the Art Students League, I also had been teaching drawing from the nude every semester for twenty-two years; nevertheless I had never noticed that the right and left sides of faces and bodies did not perfectly mirror each other. Nor had I encountered it in any instructional or historical text relating to figurative art.
To me, this asymmetry was a perfect metaphor for the condition of being human and alive.
Note: titles of artworks include numbers for reference and does not necessarily imply their order of creation.