Strong Senders
This group of work, Strong Senders, has evolved over a two year period. Like most projects, it started small and became slowly what it is today- 200 portraits of people from all walks of life and of every ethnic extraction- A veritable quilt of life and death in these United States.
The story of these faces comes from my position as a Cancer Information Specialist for the American Cancer Society’s toll-free number. I spent almost five years taking over 30,000 calls from cancer patients and their families from every state in the union. Through that time, I had to deal with many personal tragedies and their consequential stories of hope and despair and provide a listening ear for those facing their own mortality directly or through the death of a loved one.
One day I noticed that on particularly involved calls I would draw doodles on a pad normally dedicated to taking notes of the caller’s issues. After a while of engaging in this relaxing but directionless activity, I had the amusing idea of drawing what I thought to be the physical appearance of the disembodied voice on the other end of the line. So, on July 27th, 2003, I brought a sketchbook to work and penciled my first subjects in a set of six portraits on the page. During a six month period I amassed a gallery of 250 portraits I created before quit my job at the Cancer Society in March of 2004. During this time, I penciled in the faces during the daytime at work, and inked them at night at my apartment.
Besides their face and shoulders, the only other detail I would include with these little drawings was the state and sometimes city from which they were calling. I did this to jog my memory if I was trying to recall the conversation, and to aid in organizing the portraits as I branched out into different projects. Later, I started writing down memorable quotes from some of the callers, and those are included in later portraits I’ve completed.
In January of 2004 I started to group these portraits chronologically in larger sets of 20 and added color to the pictures with gouache, with the exception of one set of twenty in which I thought would be more effective in black and white. Recently, I have started to design a set of postcards with some of the more memorable quotes I wrote down in the midst of taking calls. Those will soon be available for sale in the merchandise section of this website.
I think of this art as “conceptual cartooning,” because the portraits themselves are in a cartoon style, the idea of using them as a measurement of experience that lends itself more towards a conceptual art perspective. It is not about each individual cartoon per se, but the whole of them together as a tapestry of time and human contact. I talked to all these people, and more importantly, listened to them when they didn’t have someone else with whom to talk. They all made an impression on me. I, in turn, made an impression of them. They are all out there somewhere in some form, and I have borrowed their essence for what you see in front of you. Every picture tells a story—the joy is in listening to what they have to say.