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Drake Carr, the New York-based artist, will already be in Paris by the time you read this. Carr has in the last year or so gotten quite the reputation for his terrific portraiture, which combines highly stylized gestures with a very real and revealing distillation of whoever is sitting for him (a list which has, so far, included everyone from Pat Cleveland to Dara Allen, Karlie Kloss, and Connie Fleming). Now he has packed up his Caran d Ache crayons and Holbein pencils in his Catalogue leather tote bought in Detroit to head to Paris for his Les Walk-Ins residency and drawing show at the Mariposa Gallery, which will run from February 26 to March 23.
Note that I didn’t say the show opens on the 26th. Carr is spending those first few days of his residency drawing, and drawing, and… drawing, so that by the time of the opening on March 1, he’ll have new work ready to show. Like his previous Walk-Ins—at Ethan James Green’s gallery New York Life on Canal Street last January, or his day sketching at Vogue’s Forces of Fashion in October, where Paloma Elsseser and Anok Yai sat for him—everything will be created in real time. When the show does open, Carr will draw as people drop by to see the show and work right through to the very end.
The Mariposa Gallery residency, it turns out from talking to Carr, has come rather out of the blue—but also kind of not. “It was decided in December, which is quite short notice for a show,” he said, in a manner which suggested that he wasn’t phased by the quick turnaround one bit—perhaps because he’d been willing Paris to happen. “At the end of Walk-Ins last year I kept saying I want to do it in Paris, but I didn’t pursue it. I must have manifested it in a way, because now it’s happening!”
The gallery is new—the Drake Carr Les Walk-Ins residency will be its third show—but he feels they’re already on the same wavelength. The first featured the work of artist and photographer Peter Schlesinger, an American who captured the louche world of 1970s Paris and the fashion and art folks who were part of it. “I was so inspired when I saw images from that first show,” Carr said, “because the Schlesinger photos are quite beautiful, and they evoke a similar feeling to Walk-Ins. I can’t help but be inspired by that era of style and art—Warhol, and Hockney, or Americans in Paris like Antonio Lopez—because Walk-Ins is also inspired, in part, by Antonio doing live illustrations back then.”
The unique nature of his drawing residencies means that he could accept the invitation and just trust. “One of the things about the Walk-Ins set up I really like is that I don’t need to prepare the art before I go,” he said. “Typically, if I am offered a show, it’s like, OK, great: I have a certain number of months, maybe a year, to make all the work. But this—I just show up.” Carr is being characteristically modest here; having worked with him on Forces, I’ve seen how that “showing up” involves a lot of thought and intuition about who he’s going to sketch—a process of figuring out before surrendering to create in the moment.
That said, Les Walk-Ins, as he mentioned, will be a little different from the past. For one thing, those walking into Mariposa to be drawn will have been cast already and have made an appointment to come by. And for another: Carr is open to working outside the gallery environment before bringing the art back to be installed at the space. “I will be drawing at Mariposa, but I will also draw in people’s homes, maybe in their hotels, maybe in a museum,” he says. “If someone is only free at 9 pm, I will be drawing them at nine. But I love to draw in the morning with coffee, too, so I am open. It might be a few long days, and some days where I’m walking around and getting some inspiration.”
As to who he will be drawing, Carr is thinking about a few friends and acquaintances who will be in town for the shows—Dara Allen, say, and Ethan James Green; perhaps set decorator Julia Wagner, or Bryn Taubensee, one half of Vaquera—but the leap into the unknown is thrilling for him. “In New York, even if I don’t know someone personally, I have an idea of who’s out and about and who’s part of a group,” he said. “In Paris, I’m not nearly as familiar. This is the first time I am taking Walk-Ins on the road, so I don’t know exactly what to expect or how the city will show up in the drawings. Some people make me want to use a lot of color, or be really delicate, or be really fast and use a lot of black, making big strokes and gestures. I am really curious as to how things will be different.”
What won’t change: the complicity between artist and sitter. “I tend to have a silhouette I am drawn to, which is often shoulder-focused,” Carr said, “and I will ask people to bring some options so we can play dress-up, but at the same time, it really depends.” So some people will just arrive and be easel-ready? “Easel-ready,” Carr said, laughing. “I like that. I am going to use it.”
Les Walk-Ins, Gallery Mariposa, 26th February to March 23rd 2024, with the show opening March 1st.