This exbhibition, cocurated with White Columns director Matthew Higgs, was the first New York solo show in over 30 years by the Los Angeles–based artist Don Bachardy. It included 30 recent drawings of male nudes, selected from the many hundreds Don had been working on for several years at the time. Drawn from life, these  drawings function almost as a journal: an often melancholic visual account of Don’s daily interactions and engagements with his sitters.

About these backs-and-forths, the artist has written: “I used to believe that my habit of intense, sustained effort without pre-planning or breaks was necessitated by my insistence on working from life and trying to still the fleeting moment. But lately I have come to realize that this insistence itself has a deeper, more complicated source. My method of work is an expression of my own peculiar psychological make-up, of my need to challenge myself and my sitter (to add a dash of sadism to my masochism—always spicier when the two are combined and shared) with my stringent demands on the nerves, patience, and stamina of us both. Stretching them to extremes and beyond increases my desire to penetrate further into the dense realm of hard peering. And the circumstance itself—two people sitting alone for hours on end, sometimes looking long and deeply into each other’s eyes as the day’s light fades… I know of no other experience in life that matches it.”

For the exhibition, I edited and designed a special edition of White Columns’s Xerox publication The W.C.