Wanderings and Discoveries

As so often happens with my creative process, wanderings evolve into ideas. Ideas transform into action.  Action promotes discoveries. A friend of mine once said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

In February of 2020, while I was preparing for my last exhibition at Remarque, I took a side trip to do three small portrait drawings of my mentors for a fundraiser. The feeling of being with them while doing the drawings as well as the joy of the process lead to my Covid Portrait project a few weeks later as we began to shelter in place. I showed 11 of these alongside my developing body of work.

More recent wanderings lead to a new group of works based on the many trips we’ve taken along the “High Road” to access our cabin in the Carson National Forest. Most of the images from this series were done between 2023 and 2024. I had planned to continue with this when I made a couple of other discoveries.

While assisting an artist in my studio we used the CMYK, 4-color process, as way of doing an intaglio rendition based on one of his watercolors. I had begun a project years ago with this technique but abandoned it when it did not give me the results I desired. With the success of this recent project I decided to re-visit the technique for my own work. “Adam’s Wall” is the result.

Wandering then again, one day this past fall as I was organizing my flat file drawer containing all the portrait images (drawings, transparencies, prints and masks) I happen to place several of the transparencies on top of each other and some very exciting images appeared. It was again time to visit with my closest family, friends and mentors but with a familiar twist.

The idea of overlapping the eyes from one face to the next first appeared in my 1972 etching, “Still-life.” I used that technique several more times in the 1990’s and early 2000’s with overlapping images of Rembrandt and John Lennon. But now I have 30 drawn portraits to play with and the excitement of combining various family members and other related faces along with backgrounds created with the 4-color process has me wandering in new directions while still making endless discoveries.

Ron Pokrasso, 2025