Last Sketches, 2016-2017

Erin Currier

Format: 5.50x8.50 - 216x140 mm

130 pages / Full Color

ISBN 978-1-937487-97-3

Price: $19.99

“A poignant testimony, an image of absolute love.”

    Pierre Toutain-Dorbec

    The diary or journal can rise to the level of an art form. Such is the case with artist Erin Currier’s Last Sketches, drawings of her partner, the artist, poet, and activist Anthony Hassett, that she drew every day of the final months of his life, brought short by a terminal illness in February of 2017.

    The sketches show Anthony in quiet moments, often seated, occupied with his daily routines of writing, working in his studio, taking breakfast with Erin, cushioning their chihuahua Noche, taking in the sun. Erin’s drawings display a sureness in rendering the subject borne of the artist’s command of the medium and her intimacy with the sitter. The daily progression of portraits gradually convey the artist’s infinite care for her subject, a solicitude that manifests itself in the later portraits through the subtle depiction of Anthony’s diminishing physical state.

    Yet this poignant visual narrative does not prepare the viewer for the last drawing, done after Anthony’s passing, at sunrise on February 17, 2017, cradled in Erin’s arms. His body rests upon the bed he shared with Erin, beneath a blanket now become a gentle pall strewn with shells, eight roses as its head. Familiar, cherished items encircle the bed—a small wood box, a red lamp, slippers—keeping watch, plaintive symbols of loss, unwilling sentinels of sorrow.

    Dr. Richard Tobin, Taos, New Mexico. 2017