Cool People

This drawing is called Cool People. I made it in 2011 using pen on paper. It was based on a photo I found online of a group of people posing together. I don’t know who they were. I chose it because it seemed like it might make an interesting drawing.

At the time, I was drawing a lot, usually without much planning. I was still figuring out what I wanted my work to look like. Most of the drawings from that period were made quickly and without much revision. This one is no different. It is crowded, uneven, and the faces feel disconnected. It looks like what it is, something made during a time when I was still working things out.

The people in the drawing are smiling and trying to look at ease, but none of them really are. The guy in the “Out of here” shirt seems the most aware of how performative it all feels. I titled it Cool People because the image had that familiar tone of people trying to appear effortless while clearly trying very hard. The title is meant to be sarcastic. That part was intentional.

I wasn’t thinking much about meaning when I drew this, but looking at it now, there is a kind of discomfort that feels familiar. I had been in this scene many times before, and by that point I was already a little removed from it. I wasn’t necessarily trying to critique it, but I probably wasn’t completely neutral either. There is a bit of tension in the drawing that came through whether I meant it to or not.

This isn’t a piece I show often, but I’ve kept it around. It marks a point in time when I was figuring things out by doing a lot of drawing and not worrying too much about how any of it would land.