Larry Day, Untitled (Ruth Fine)

Artist and curator Ruth Fine was also the wife of Larry Day. Here, Day depicts Fine seated frontally, her dramatic dark hair framing the intensity of her expression.

In discussing Day's approach to drawing, Fine explains:

Larry really loved to draw, even -and especially -when he was painting. He was never not drawing. I have hundreds of teeny sketches. I still come across drawings in books and files of papers. Some of them are clearly related to whatever he was looking at or to specific paintings. No matter how small, they can be heavily developed. And some are very spare, just a few lines. And with groups of related drawings, you can see they were probably done on the same day using five, six, ten different linear or tonal approaches.