Hard Knocks Drawing Style Loops Its Way To Harvard Square With Honors

PR Log (Press Release) – May 02, 2007 – P R E S S    R E L E A S E

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May 1, 2007                                                                                                  Larry S. Estes
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‘HARD KNOCKS’ DRAWING LOOPS ITS WAY TO HARVARD SQUARE

CAMBRIDGE– May 1, 2007- “New England opens her arms to you,” said gallery owner Kathryn Schultz as she informed Virginia artist Larry Samuel Estes that he had won the Drawing Prize in Cambridge Art Association’s 10th Annual National Prize Show. The juror, Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums, chose Larry and 9 other winners out of over 1000 entries. “Owing to Harvard’s highly regarded drawing collection, and Dr. Lentz’s credentials, I couldn’t have been more honored had I won the Jerwood Drawing Prize (UK),” expressed Larry. The show opens May 4, at the Kathryn Schultz and University Galleries in Cambridge, Mass.

There is an intense sense of urgency to Larry’s drawings whose origins go back to a door plant in Virginia where he worked. About 20 years ago, Larry mounted a drawing board to a post next to his machine. In between assembling doors on the line, he would draw. “I couldn’t afford a studio, much less college. Adaptation became my subject matter,” Larry recalled.

Larry vowed to win an exhibition in New York without a studio. After leaving the plant in the 90’s, he continued developing his drawing style in his spare time at fast-food restaurants. The years rolled by and eventually Larry got into local and regional juried shows.

By early 2003, he went to New York, hitting the pavement with drawings in hand. Before leaving, he slipped a slide submission under the door of a Soho gallery sponsoring a national competition. Back home, Larry continued drawing and on May 1, while drawing at a fast-food restaurant, he received a call from that gallery. He was informed that the competition’s juror from the Museum of Modern Art selected him for 2nd Place, earning him a show in Soho.      

In the summer of 2006, a curator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art selected Larry for an Honorable Mention in a National Works on Paper Competition. Last February Larry won a Merit Award, one of the top six awards, in the critically acclaimed International Juried Art Show at the Visual Arts Center in New Jersey. The juror, a senior curator from the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, selected Larry out of 1800 entries.

Larry’s future goals include exhibiting the development of his loopy drawing style, from its origins in the factory to the present, titled “Drawing My Ship In.” It would consist of images of spatial confinement, the play of opposites, archetypes, and figurative forms of vivid color, laid out in chronological order. “Art history is composed of artists, who have their own histories. An exhibition of how one arrived at their voice offers insight into not only the plastic concerns of surfaces, but the deeper concerns within humanity’s psyche,” Larry concludes.

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