A Drawing Like No Other: Marilyn Brought Back to Life in 9,000,000 Marks

Opens February 7 at the American University Museum:

A Drawing Like No Other: Marilyn Brought Back to Life in 9,000,000 Marks

With a depth of resolution created by nine million graphite marks, A Drawing Like No Other is Billy Pappas’s pencil drawing of mid-20th century screen icon Marilyn Monroe. Pappas, a Baltimore native, spent nearly nine years working seven days a week, 16 hours a day, to create this single drawing of Monroe, based on a Richard Avedon photo from 1957. Curated by Gary Vikan. Gallery Talk: 2 to 3 p.m., Feb. 17.

This exhibition is devoted to a drawing – its artist and his creative process – with a depth of resolution that guest curator Gary Vikan declares has “likely never before been achieved in the history of art.”

Its creator, Billy Pappas, a Baltimore native and graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, set out in 1994 to create the “apotheosis of naturalistic portraiture” and establish a new standard for drawing. Billy’s point of departure was a reproduction of Richard Avedon’s famous soft-focus portrait of Marilyn Monroe from 1957.

More than eight years and nearly nine million marks later, Billy completed this extraordinary work, using nothing more elaborate than standard drawing pencils and two sets of magnifiers. The drawing’s precision and detail are so profound, its visual data so rich and deep, that it required the narrow band multi-spectral imaging techniques developed by Bill Christens-Barry for imaging of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As Charles Falco of the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona remarked: “By incorporating 3-dimensional information from live models, Billy has arrived at his own solution to the fundamental limitation of the photograph.”

Learn about Billy Pappas’ creative process and the critical reception of this work, including his related encounter with David Hockney which became the subject of an award-winning documentary by Julie Checkoway, Waiting for Hockney. In his review of the film following its premiere at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, Ben Davis of Artnet wrote: “Pappas has clearly done something, maybe even something great – you leave the film wanting to see the work in real life.”

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