Kevin’s Friends

 

I’ve had a large art folder with some of Kevin McCarty’s charcoal sketches stored away in a closet for over a decade and I’ve been meaning to pull them out and put them in their poster protectors. The few times I’ve stumbled upon this folder it has always seemed like there would be time at a later date to make it happen. Well, today is finally that day.

As I’ve handled them I realize the paper has thinned and dried out into a brittle dark beige that is turning brown in spots. The poster protectors that they were meant to be placed in have sat unused and still shrink-wrapped with the sketches all these years. None too soon I have unwrapped them and carefully slipped the large pieces of sketch paper between the thin particle board back and clear plastic cover.

The thing that stands out to me is that three of the four sketches are of one person. The remaining one is of three people in various stages of completion sitting in chairs and at a counter. I recognize the setting as The Country Shed which was a greasy spoon restaurant in Marion, Indiana where the locals hung out but was torn down when the bypass was expanded.

Initially I did not realize the three men in separate sketches were the same person, but then on closer inspection it became clear: beard, large glasses, baseball cap, dark sleeveless shirt, and coffee cup. The different iterations looked different to me because he is drawn from three different angles. This kind of sketching was typical for Kevin in preparing to create an oil painting. It allowed him to understand what he was seeing with his one weakened eye and lack of depth perception that most are afforded by virtue of having two eyes. Maybe even more important than the visual aspects was the process itself which gave him time to talk to his subjects and get to know them on a more personal level.

I’m sure for Kevin it was a win-win situation. He loved talking to people and could spend hours going back and forth about any number of topics though he had a preference for existential questions. I never specifically asked him about it but as someone who has knowledge about retinoblastoma and sarcomas from medical school I wondered if his elevated risk for cancer recurrence as an adult and related increase in mortality was always somewhere in the back of his mind.

And here I sit at this desk surrounded by his long hidden works trying to give them their due. His eye has become my eyes trying to understand this man from decades passed when The Country Shed was a place to experience the connections that bind us all together.