Existing comment:
Artistic Practice
"The art of the daily deadline," as Oliphant terms it, was punishing. Each day he was up at 5:30am to read the major newspapers and, depending upon the decade, watch cable news and consult the web to "bring himself to a boil" before retreating to his studio. First he would sketch in pencil in a small-scale sketchbook. Later he would emerge with a final drawing -- done with a brush, or pen and ink -- filled with sharp commentary (and, as a point of pride, always well before deadline).
Over the years, Oliphant's time in the studio expanded to include printmaking, painting, and sculpture. The studio itself came to house not only a drawing table and library but also a printing press, a sculpture stand, and an easel. The added media provided a greater expressive range for his political and social commentary through deepening allusions, whether in contrasts of light and dark, equivalences of texture, or ambitions of scale.
On special display here is one of Oliphant's drawing boards, which holds pride of place in Oliphant's studio to this day. It vividly maps Oliphant's doodles, the accretions of days in lines and ink spills out of which the artist discovered frogs and nudes and other creatures. Nearby is a sculpted self-portrait in which Oliphant imagines himself interrogating and exposing a naked Nixon -- a character who skulked or lurked in Oliphant's sketchbooks and cartoon drawings years after his death, a malevolent companion representing corruption and human failing. He embodies Oliphant's symbiotic relationship with powerful public figures, "all of them exciters of the linkage between brain and drawing hand." |