Skeletons and Monsters
Two kinds of body share this room. One is a skeleton: a stick figure of bones, drawn in a few colored lines, dancing or walking on a flat ground. The other is a monster: a hunched, furred or armored creature in the dark, with fangs. Twenty works, from New Year's Day 2022 to June 3.
The skeletons are all limbs. Their arms and legs bend at too many joints, their hands are spread like rakes, and their heads are small skulls with teeth. Most of them wear something: a jacket, a tutu, a hat. The monsters are all mass. They crouch, they fill the square, and the light picks out teeth and eyes and leaves the rest in shadow.
The two kinds do not alternate neatly. Watch the stick figures loosen through February, then see the monsters take over the room in April and May, until the last work is a creature hanging in a dark forest.
New Year Skeletons
Three stick figures from the first three days of 2022, then the first monster at the end of the month.
NNOTB #16
A horned figure in a jacket stands square on an olive ground, drawn in black with a cream fill, its ribs showing through the coat like a fossil. Thin red and yellow lines wander over the whole square in loose rectangles, as if a second drawing had been laid on the first. The hands are two rakes of fingers. The year 2022 begins with this work, made in the morning of January 1.
NNOTB #17
A stick figure in a pink tutu stands on one leg like a pole, arms out, its head a ball of red scribble with two round eyes.
NNOTB #18
A lanky figure in blue and orange line dances on teal, one arm raised high in a loop, its small skull grinning with white fangs.
NNOTB #26
A skeleton painted in dark purple and grey emerges from black, its skull tilted toward you, its ribcage open, one hand held up with the fingers spread. Light catches the top of the skull, the knuckles and the edges of the ribs, and everything else sinks into the ground. It is the first painted body in the room, and the first with no color at all beyond the purple of the bone.
February: Hats and Fangs
Eight works in three weeks. Skeletons put on hats and cowboy boots, and between them the monsters arrive, one with fangs and one with a grin.
NNOTB #27
A hunched creature with a long skull, a red mouth of white fangs and two red eyes crouches in grey light, its fur drawn in a halo of black and white scratches. Four days after the purple skeleton, the painted body is back, but furred, with hands planted on the ground and a spine of spikes down its back. The dark around it is not flat; it is made of soft grey discs, like a fog.
Compare with #26, in this room
NNOTB #28
Two skeletons in yellow and pink line meet on orange, one bending low and the other reaching down, their skulls grinning with white fangs.
NNOTB #29
A boxy creature with cat ears and a wide white grin, in colored scribble over a grey grid.
Wings, Crowns and Cowboys
March and April. A moth, a crowned skeleton on a maze, a horned creature, and two more cowboys, one dancing on red and one walking downhill.
NNOTB #39
A moth with wings of gold and black stripes spreads them across a purple ground, its small red face at the top with two antennae. The body is a stack of striped segments, and the wings are drawn in long curved strokes that follow their shape. Two round tips hang below like feet. It is the one winged creature in the room, and the most carefully built, with 380 recorded strokes.
Monsters
The last four works, from April 25 to June 3, are all monsters, and all painted. The skeletons are gone.
NNOTB #57
A blob of a monster fills the square from the black, its mouth a cave of white teeth, its two eyes on stalks with orange lids. The body is drawn in green and brown with scribble over it, and a hand at the upper right holds up a small round thing. In February a purple figure grinned with a row of teeth; here the grin has become the whole body, and the eyes have left the head.
Compare with #33, in this room
NNOTB #66
A blue bull with small horns walks through orange fire, its back and legs drawn in blue and green scribble, a bouquet of smoke rising from its tail.
NNOTB #128
A furry creature with a huge mane of colored strokes grins with white fangs, one red eye showing, on a ground of yellow circles.
NNOTB #138
A hunched creature with long hair and long thin arms hangs in a dark forest, drawn in black and gold strokes between tall black tree trunks, the sky behind it burning orange. Its face looks down and is barely there. The hands reach toward the ground. It is the last work in the room, made June 3, 2022, and the only one where the monster has a place to be: a forest, with trees and a sky.
Closing
Look again at the first skeleton, standing square in its jacket on New Year's Day, and then at the creature hanging in the forest in June. The one is all bone and line on a flat ground. The other is all hair and shadow in a place with trees. The room walked from one to the other in five months.