Mugshots

One of the vague New Years quasi-resolutions I made this year was to force myself to spend more time making art. I spent three days before Christmas making a couple paintings for my family as gifts, but other than that I haven't really painted anything since I left Chicago. This is in large part simply because at my old Chicago job, I got off at 5 every day, was home by 5:15, and didn't have to think about/do work until the next morning at 8:30. And my weekends were entirely mine, not cluttered up with grading, and planning. But, no excuses. I want to spend some more time painting. And I want to get good at painting people.

So, I was skimming through the Charlotte Observer's online mugshot collection yesterday, looking for my student (who showed me his picture in the hardcopy version), and I found myself scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of faces. Arrests from the whole week, I guess, or whatever they have up the their website. But they were the most fascinating, scary, sad, beautiful, interesting faces. I suppose when you photograph someone right after they've been arrested, there's going to be a whole range of emotions expressed on their faces, and they're not going to look all done up and pretty. But it occurred to me that I could draw them, and maybe paint some of them. It'd be good practice drawing a whole bunch of very different looking people with very different facial expressions.
This is Maddie Ruth Grigley, charged with 'communicating threats.'

I feel a little weird drawing someone's portrait without their knowledge, like it's an invasion of privacy in some way. Their photographs, names, height, weight and criminal charges are all online for anyone to see, and I'm not making money off of them, but it still feels odd in some way. Although you wouldn't know it was a mugshot from the drawing, necessarily. It's just a portrait of an old woman. Which I guess is the point - regardless of what she's done, she's a woman just like I am, a human being just like anybody else.