Markulis dot Com

Nudes

The Nudes come from a period in my career when I acted as Coordinator of Figure Drawing for the Pyramid Arts Center (now Rochester Contemporary), an avant-garde arts space in Rochester, NY. For these open studio sessions we had a pretty disparate group of artists, most of whom wanted to do primarily quick gesture sketches or short poses of no more than twenty to thirty minutes long. As a result, I accumulated a collection of partially finished drawings, all of which began languishing in my studio. I then hit upon the idea of finishing some of the pieces as best I could from memory. Later, I began adding backgrounds and imaginary landscapes to the works. The result was a series of figures and settings which were totally removed from the original live sessions.

For several of the earlier works, I took a fairly simple approach: first, developing the “base” figure in Ebony pencil (my usual medium of choice for the open studio sessions) and then, creating the background with colored pencil. Later, I began adding color to the figures and incorporating a wider range of media – acrylics, molding paste, ribbon, glitter, cut paper, photo tape, glue – into many of the pieces. All of them are on paper – either, printmaking or high quality drawing bond – and range in size from 20" x 25" to 22" x 30".

As to themes, the Nudes obviously acknowledge Eros and the libidinous impulse. In addition, many of the pictures contain images of goats and the Neolithic menhirs of Brittany, the Celtic Northwestern region of France. (These leitmotifs figure prominently throughout much of my work over the past dozen years or so.) As I progressed in this series, I moved away from a literal rendering of the figures and started to alter the forms and faces much more aggressively. This result was achieved through both, intentional distortion, and application of intense color.

. . .