Baffling, Scruffy Sketches Based on Prison Photos

I realised last week that my banner for my Twitter profile was enlarged and pixelated and looked a bit naff, so I put a call out for suggestions for a new one. Out of left-field came artist David Kelly-Mancaux a.k.a. Erkembode who offered any of his sketches from his series Prison Fights. I took the opportunity.

If you’re confused by them, I am too. David tells me they are based upon prison photographs, presumably portraits. He made them in response to his friend’s book Prison Fights about people who’d got into violent altercation. They’re from 2011.

I think, but am not sure, they are the product of a process David calls Visual Translation which seems to me like a mandatory type of doodling. Whenever, wherever. David has made visual translations of poems, poetry reading, Egon Schiele paintings; I don’t think there’s anything off bounds.

I might not fully understand the motives and the process but I don’t understand the world so it works. Also, the process by which I came across the Prison Photography logo was of equal abandon and random.

See the banner at my Twitter account.

And thank you to David Kelly-Mancaux!