The only time I ever went to formal art school was at a Boston University summer session at Tanglewood, the famous arts center in western Massachusetts. This was in the summer of 1972. The session packed a whole year of art instruction and practice into two months. We B.U. students were housed in the dorms of an elite prep school with elements of "rehab." We drew from models every day and were encouraged to draw anything we saw using whatever medium we wanted to.
This person is my roommate, Janine Sadler. She was from Amarillo, Texas and was a natural blonde, that is her hair actually came out of her head that way. I had rarely seen this coloration and I wanted to draw her to show it so here she is, two views of her.
Janine had just had a romantic break-up with someone and she had replaced her ex with Jesus. A sort of low-content but high intensity Bible-worshiping Jesus fundamentalism was circulating around the art school and Janine was one of the instigators. I was going through my own spiritual issues being attracted to Catholicism and the fundamentalism disturbed me greatly, not knowing which of these was the "true" Christianity. It would take years before I decided that neither of them was it alone.
Pencil on sketchbook page, 5" x 7 1/2", summer 1972.
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