“Jack of Hearts” (first version,1996; second version, November 2023)

“Jack of Hearts” (first version,1996; second version, November 2023)

India Ink on paper

$200 (please email dterrydraw@aol.com or private message if interested in purchase).

I bought a new set of rapidographs,. which arrived yesterday. I spent the first twenty (literally) years of My Brilliant Career doing nothing but black&white.

This drawing brought me a lot of attention in 1996 (I donated it to an AIDS auction and subsequently received the state’s “Emerging Artists” award). At the time, it was all a lot of fuss and bother which I hadn’t anticipated, when all I’d done was to draw how I felt about half of my friends dropping like flies, dead of AIDS, left and right. I have no idea who bought the original, since I’ve never kept up with such matters.

I drew this long before I ever even met Herve or (As eventually came about) really learned anything about adult grief. At the time I first drew this, grief did, indeed, seem fresh and unexpected. I re-drew this today with my new rapidographs……wondering about my younger self. I wouldn’t, at that time, have understood the poem that I’m posting below this….

Do go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B51hO8McLbs

“Time, that renews the tissues of this frame,

That built the child and hardened the soft bone,

Taught him to wail, to blink, to walk alone,

Stare, question, wonder, give the world a name,

Forget the watery darkness from whence he came,

Attends no less the boy to manhood grown,

Brings him new raiment, strips him of his own;

All skins are shed at length, remorse, even shame.

Such hope is mine, if this indeed be true,

I dread no more the first white in my hair,

Or even age itself, the easy shoe,

The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair:

Time, doing this to me, may alter too

My sorrow, into something I can bear.”