Red Grooms

This impressive portrait records Grooms's friendship with photographer and cinematographer Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999), with whom he collaborated on several films in the 1960s. The drawing was made from a sketch Grooms did during a trip the two artists took to the pre-Columbian Inca site of Machu Picchu, Peru. The mix of humor and tenderness is characteristic of Grooms's style, which relates to the aesthetics of the comic strip. Having started with the head, Grooms eventually ran out of space for the feet and continued on another sheet of paper.