Simply Drawing/Drawing Simply

A simple wooden stand in front of a laundromat. A number of figures, famous and infamous (Angela Davis, Michael Jackson, Marcus Garvey, and Dr. Hibbert from “The Simpsons”), simply drawn and placed on the walls. A simple table, littered with colored markers, on the curb and surrounded by chairs.

And a simple question: “Would you like to sit down and draw?”

Of course, there is nothing simple in that question. For communities in which art has, unfortunately, become to many a foreign idea, done at the intersection of madness and childhood, to ask the question “Would you like to draw” is to utter a provocation, to challenge notions of space (“Draw out here?”), context (“In front of a Laundromat? Next to a Taco Truck?”), commerce (“So how much does it cost?”), and appropriateness (“You want me to draw, and not my kids?”). And it is precisely this kind of provocation that Rudy Shepherd seems interested in. His work, and the context in which it is done, is very much about challenging the abstractness, the foreignness, of art, by both producing that work in a public context and, more importantly, involving the public in that context. And there is the art itself. How would these figures, these personalities, be categorized? Figures that look like ourselves, are ourselves, drawn in such a way that art again becomes about communication, about whimsy, and, very simply, fun. Simple drawings that make us smile, or laugh, or even just stop for a moment and look, and by doing so look at our world in a new, slightly different way.

By simply drawing/drawing simply with, and within, his community, he complicates the space and place of art within that community. Within our communities. So that, on an overcast Sunday afternoon, there are possibilities for conversations, for interactions, and for revelations that would not have been possible before. Perhaps the man who requested a portrait, and drew a portrait of the artist in return, rethought his relationship to art, to his ability to draw. Perhaps the child who drew while he and his parents did laundry will now organically believe that art is and should be done in his own neighborhood, and not necessarily only at school or in a museum. These are small things, small possibilities, but nonetheless revolutionary in their simplicity. A revolution whereby we can all imagine ourselves as artists, as creators, in our neighborhoods. And a revolution sparked by seemingly the simplest of questions.

Would you like to sit down and draw?