A Saturated Sponge

Funny. You start drawing and you’re just trying to get it right, to get the basics down, to tell the story. A man is washing a corpse. I had no idea about the qualities of the man or the corpse, only that they were poor and the washer would be simply dressed, wearing a schmatah on his head, and have a beard. A nineteenth-century Ashkenazi Jew somewhere in the miserable eastern lands, as my father called them. Then feelings emerge in the drawings. I see that the corpse-washer has an immense tenderness for the corpse. Could have just been doing his lousy job but no, he does it with reverence. He shows me, he tells me, and, suddenly, I too have reverence for the corpse, compassion for the corpse. And the corpse-washer.

Also funny how one’s influences, including ones you’ve forgotten, pour out of you into the drawing. Walter Pichler! Chaim Soutine! Charlotte! I never thought of “imitating” them. But here they are, pouring out. We get saturated by our influences and then when we are touched they just pour out like water from a completely saturated sponge.