In making portraits of these vagrants, characters who have now become one with the street, we turn them into icons. Through our distinctive artistic treatment they become our muses.
Some of these portraits are from photographs of unknown found via different sources like internet, magazines, press, or from the photographic series by Lee Jeffries and his work on homeless people that we admire. These pictures are drawn in black chalk with attention to realism.
By showing them full front-view, full-frame and full-size against their street background, with the care and attention a gallery owner would devote to an exhibition, these portraits are almost imposed upon the viewer; emaciated faces, carved by the merciless chisel of life, rough sometimes to the point of being primal, mineral.
Wrinkles grow like cracks on the surfaces of their skin-wall; grey like they have developed some typically urban disease, their asperities reflect the tarmac and walls of our cities. Time leaves its imprint on the drawing and likewise, deteriorates it, defaces it and tears it whilst at the same time being impregnated by it, blending with the texture, disappearing into the substrate it has been applied onto. This analogy and this work on the ephemeral, the relationship between the work and its medium, and that with space and the action of time all contribute to transforming, transfiguring the drawing into a unique work. The output, the work, is the photographic testimony.
This series is underpinned by a text printed in small font and positioned at the centre of a large format frame, identical to the portraits in shape and size and which force the viewer to come closer in order to be able to read and therefore in the same breath closer to these faces and the theme conveyed.
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