UTW 31

Bar mitzvah age boy in the Warsaw ghetto /Junge im Bar Mitzvah Alter im Warschauer Ghetto

Art: 1996
Media:  Ink on paper
Framed, 108 H inches H x 44 W [243.8 x 111.7 cm]

Drawn from another photo of a nameless and anonymous child victim of the Nazi's. Like the girl in the drawing Girl in Rags, he appears to be about 11-13 years of age in the photo.

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His shoes were rags tied around his feet. The drawing was done using pen & ink techniques combining pointillism (dots), gestural lines, dashes, and crosshatching. All the ink drawing in the series is done with bottled ink and different metal pen nibs on pen holders; one exception was the 'Felix Nussbaum' self-portrait in the "Shoah Dreams" drawing: he was drawn using a wider-pointed bamboo pen.

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Because of the large size of the drawing, which I had tacked to a wall of my art studio, I didn't take it to the Burke Museum to draw wings. They were drawn from photos of bird in a library book about birds-in-flight. One viewer, who saw it on exhibit in the late 1990’s, and is now a Seattle school district elementary school teacher, said the drawing made her think of "magic realism" (bringing to mind a visual counterpart to the Latin American literary tradition).