I feel like the drawing-through-Zoom thing is working!

At least for people I know, and I’ve known Victoria since 1975! We had a wonderful visit over Zoom on Sunday and I made this drawing, on Strathmore Toned Gray Mixed Media paper.

This one is on illustration board, from 1987.

Note the X-Men comic and the careful rendering of the china set my Mom had then!

This is from 1986 or 1987.

Can’t remember if it is a black and white study or this is a photo of a photocopy, I found it on the hard drive from my last attempt at archiving all my work, in 2010. Found the original and photographed it!

This is a two-color watercolor study from Fall 1986.

Victoria was my primary model during my NYC art school years. She posed for a lot of portraits. This one was done at one of the Cuban-Chinese train car diners my Chelsea neighbourhood used to be full of. I used to give her downers to help her hold still, so her expression may be the result of a lot of Valium.

I did this one in January 1993.

I had at that point met and moved in with my first husband, Steve, and we were living in a big duplex in St. Paul. I think this was in NY, although Victoria lived in DC at the time. She came up to the city because I had gone to a comic convention in New York; I was just about to finally break into comics.

Here’s Victoria and I in her mother’s painting studio at their loft on Great Jones St. in 1980.

Photo by her mom, the artist J. Nebraska Gifford. I was thirteen and she was fourteen. We would say we were staying at each other’s houses and just stay out all night wandering the Village.

This is Victoria on New Year’s Eve 1995, in DC.

We had made strange and elaborate hats out of newspaper, and there was some kind of walkie-talkie game?

And this one is Victoria and her former husband, Gideon.

You can see some of Victoria’s recent art on this guest post here. We are about to start a collaboration – I’m gonna embroider one of her drawings!

Only a couple of these portraits had ever been photographed; no modern media record of the rest existed – if we had a fire or flood they would just be gone forever. And of course, I am the only person who knows when they were made and why, the story of the moments in the pictures.

As a highly-vulnerable person with asthma and autoimmune illness, it seems more important than ever to document my life’s work. Not morbid, just pragmatic!

I am so grateful to my Patrons on Patreon, whose monthly financial support makes it possible for me to take time to document my art archives.