Natural patterns bring together huge figures of the sacred portrait of Robert Pruitt – Huge
Robert Pruitt creates portraits through tight, round traces and soft shadows that bring the audience into a magical world. His work blends charcoal, pores and pastels, rooted in storytelling, and how personal narratives can see a broader, more collective question about Southern culture, rituals and the identity of the entitlement.
The artist brought the model into his Harlem Studio and took photos of them wearing their well-crafted outfits. Although Pruit prefers huge scales, his drawings emerge from these conversations. The portraits are rendered on coffee-dyed paper, extending over seven feet, with detailed shadows and line backgrounds that exude characteristic warm hues.
Recent self-portraits put his signature novel glasses on the artist, with rotating X-ray lenses placed on his forehead. His hands, not his face, are the subject of this ten-foot-wide piece, each wearing gold jewels, his hometown represents the Houston Rockets. Richard Pryor’s role as Herman Smith in a 1978 recap The Wonderful Wizard of the Wizard of Oz,,,,, Wiz.
He said the decoration stands out in Pruitt’s work and has a dual purpose: it provides a way to dig into questions about identity, culture, location and time, and also provides an opportunity to find something “funny and weird”. Recurring patterns such as lemons, mushrooms, snakes and birds are the latest addition to his portraits, which often surround the central figures. For example, in “Pelixir with Plague”, a typical Texan creature perched on the shoulders and arms of a sitting woman.
“Recently, I’ve been thinking about the continuity of the body and the world. Our bodies have put things in, and for me, the process marks equality with everything around us,” Pruitt told The Giant.
Connecting with Nature also cites the sacred and suggestiveness of the artist’s reference, whether it’s his enduring love for science fiction, comics, music, or “swamp, wet, wet Houston, Texas.”
I think part of it is nostalgic, especially the opposite of what I am now in New York City. I miss my home… To some extent, these works are like the stage for my own origin story, a complex metropolis, and it is also deeply rural. A garden of Eden, but full of mosquitoes and stray dogs. Nature is not so cute or comfortable, but is cold and still sacred.
If you are in New York, you can see Pruitt’s work in a solo exhibition named after Sun Ra Libretto, …Son…Sun…Sin…Syn…Zen…Zen…Zenat Salon No. 94.
