THE GREETING

SONY DEVABHAKTUNI

I had seen Bill Viola’s work The Greeting (1995) based on Jacopo Pontormo’s painting of the same name, several years before I started at Cooper. The images from Viola’s video stayed with me: two women are interrupted by a third, the action unfolding in slow motion so that each gesture and glance resonate, the stillness accumulating.

FIGURE 35

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Graphite and oil bar on paper (see also p. 131)

I had stills from The Greeting filed away and decided that they could be the subject of my Advanced Drawing project my final year at Cooper. I used three color images and began working with them individually. In fifteen-minute sketches using graphite pencil, I learned certain lines: the neck, heel, the curves of fabric, of the stomach. From there I worked in a larger format with multiple images at once. I worked for several minutes with each still, going back and forth so that a single drawing contained the three moments and also, perhaps, the time in-between.

Finally Sue Gussow suggested I work with color. I had used color since the short studies but only a timid and unsure mark here and there. Viola’s film is remarkably vibrant, and I wanted to explore this aspect of the work. The results were a mess.

But for the first time in my drawing, I felt a kind of liberty—perhaps color introduced a sensibility removed from the architectonic considerations that had structured my thinking about drawing. I worked with oil sticks in dark tones, smearing the color on the canvas, fascinated by the way it slid over the surface. In time, I learned that I could draw with this new material, that I could use color to build structure.

I have not seen these drawings for several years; I remember being unsatisfied with the result. I felt like I had missed something: perhaps I should have worked from the video and not stills, started working with color sooner, or taken the work further from its figurative origins. It was difficult, this sense of having made strides but at once feeling doubt. I recognize now that this was Gussow’s gift to me: to show me that place between uncertainty and epiphany that is the necessary site of creation.