Artist Statement: On Gradients
With a sneak peak of an upcoming drawing.
In my latest piece for Quillette, I staged a scene where the good and bad sides of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn compete in a chess match. I used a reference image of Bobby Fischer (U.S.) playing Michael Tal (U.S.S.R.) to make sure I drew an accurate chess board layout, while nodding to the Cold War era that I was writing about in “The Line Dividing Good and Evil.” And then I swapped out the players for two different images of Solzhenitsyn, using the convention of old Western movies where the good guy wears a large, white cowboy hat, while the bad guy wears black — one Solzhenitsyn wears a white shirt, and the other a dark suit.
