March 29, 2024

Digging Through the Files – Student Drawings by Cecil Touchon from 1975

This summer we are working on a project to go through all of Touchon’s works back to 1975 in an effort to create the catalog raisonne. Touchon started his cataloging in 2010 and has produced and annual report of his artistic work with a series of color catalogs in chronological order. With that project well in hand we are now going backwards to capture everything back to the beginning.

Today with digital technology and online print-on-demand publishing the barriers to doing this kind of detailed archiving have been greatly reduced. 
The difficulty is that until recent years photographing works was difficult and expensive. So many of Touchon’s works prior to 2010 were not carefully recorded and there is often scant photographic evidence of what works were produced. Additionally, much of the documentation work Touchon had done to organize his body of work by computer was lost in a hard-drive crash in about 2002. Years of work was lost. Luckily at least since 1990 Touchon kept a production journal that lists the inventory numbers of the works and roughly when they were produced and often the sizes and types of works. Since Touchon numbered all of his collages from the start of the series in 1983 he had to keep an inventory journal to be able to remember what the next number needed to be in the series. This is the basis of the chronology to guide the project.

Currently every sketchbook and all loose drawings, pastels, watercolors, collages and paintings that are still in the archives are being scanned or photographed, inventoried, measured etc. Many works have been sold over the years and among those, many have no photographic record. But we will be doing the best that we can with what we have.

Starting at the beginning, we would like to show you a few student drawings from 1975 when Touchon attended Florissant Valley Community College in the north suburbs of Saint Louis, Mo.

All of these drawings, of which there is a portfolio of 55 drawings, are on 18×24 inch newsprint sheets.

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