Woman Leaning Right (1976)
Drawn shortly after Woman Leaning Left, expanding the idea of the figure defining space.
Pencil on rag paper, 18″ × 24″, 1976
Woman Leaning Right is a companion to Woman Leaning Left, drawn later but in close dialogue with it. Here the figure is brought even nearer: her chin rests on her knee, her legs are crossed, her back arches gently. In a review of the With a Soft Touch exhibition, Patricia Krebbs wrote that my approach carried “the soft touch of a surgeon with a scalpel”—noting that while some tones are pale, the light in these graphite drawings can be as sharp and insistent as the chromatics in Phillip Pearlstein’s paintings.
In Woman Leaning Left I had allowed the figure to inhabit the space quietly, surrounded by it. A viewer can move through the voids of the flat wall, follow the slope of the rail behind her, and feel the slight intrusion of the picture‑frame corner at the upper right. She is fixed in the space, touched by soft light.
In Woman Leaning Right I wanted the figure to assert her presence more directly—to help define the space rather than simply occupy it. The curve of her back and the angles of her arm and legs shape the surrounding area. The highly sharpened graphite pencils invited close inspection of light across the skin, a closeness I wanted the viewer to experience. The face is cropped at the right edge not to obscure identity but to shift attention toward gesture, contour, and the quiet intimacy of presence.
At the same time, I introduced a contrasting element: the decorative mirror frame at the upper left. Its anonymity counters the direct emotional engagement of the figure, creating a tension similar to what one might feel in a color‑field painting—where pure form, color and pure presence meet.
Leaning Right (1976)