Portrait Jam

I wanted to journey into one of Scot’s electronic landscapes today. These tracks often served as anchors upon which Scot could weigh his efforts at meditation. This is a piece Scot did while he was composer-in-residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts in 1986. We had just heard a guy do scratch at a 24-hour portrait jam. What is a 24-hour portrait jam, you might ask? In this case, it was a friend of ours along with another guy, set up in this warehouse space, to do portraits for anyone who wanted one—-over the course of a 24 hour period.

Our friend invited Scot to come down and do some portraits for a while. Scot brought his airbrush along and his bag of French curves and stenciling tools, and set up to do free hand airbrush portraits. This was truly an amazing thing to watch him twist a fat wire into a curve, and using his airbrush and this edge, truly pull out a likeness from thin air.

Today’s artwork is an example of a technique where Scot would complete his line work, in this case with a chubby graphite stub. Once he had that, he would lay the drawing down on a burlap mat board, and then pull the graphite sideways across the surface of the mat board with enough pressure to register the burlap texture below. A brilliant example of ‘Art in a Minute’.