Darin Latimer

Chicago, Illinois, USA

My Whole Bit was that I made Pictures-about-Pictures. My goal was to make compelling images that would reward repeated examination all on their own. No over-arching themes, no discernible biographical or political content. I do not disapprove of or disavow personal or political art. I just didn’t want to do it myself.

And then I got very sick and nearly died.

That illness (not much further detail to come) also got dropped into the box of the Pandemic in concordance with a long stretch of my being Immuno-Compromised.

In short order, those personally imposed obstructions dropped away and during this time I made my most personal art ever.

It started somewhat humorously. Simply refusing to go out in the early days, and with a subsequent materials drought, I began painting my grocery delivery boxes and assembling them into increasingly elaborate figures that, when grouped together, resembled a Cityscape. These became the ‘Gods of the Plague’ series.

After considering doing a run of limited-edition prints, I decided instead to do a series of original drawings instead. Designing them to be ‘Contactless’ in composition I reverse-blotted every line in every single one of them resulting in Art I Never Touched.

It was during and after my first 3 weeks of Hospitalized treatment however that this dynamic truly asserted itself. First as a practical and courteous matter; I knew I couldn’t bring my odiferous Krink Ink (typical drawing medium) onto the Ward, so I downloaded a digital painting app and began messing with that. I also figured I would be doing most of this work laying down so holding a sketchbook would be unwieldy.

But I did this mostly expecting to kill time, not previous methodology. My drawings quickly retreated from exploring all the layering and compositional options of the app into swiftly and increasingly, deliberately crude figure-shapes.

When I returned home for 3 months until the next treatment I began cranking out new paintings (in phone-shaped-mimicking narrow canvases for a while) which converted these figures, often piled atop one another in pattern-mad compositions. A few were also drawn from photographs of road repair patches. I’ve taken thousands and do not distinguish them from traditional drawings.

This approach also drew inspiration from the similarly unrestrained and deeply misunderstood ‘Odalisque’ paintings of Henri Matisse, whose biography I reread in the Hospital. Always an influence, he became a guiding inspiration during this stretch.

I eventually dubbed this group of works ‘Death of Wheels’ and they are ongoing. The obvious ‘Biographical’ elements of these paintings may not be screamingly obvious, but they are Present.

@the_wabashian