The Humanity Notebooks: The Many Faces of an Urban Commute

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During the fall of the Ming Dynasty in seventeenth-century China, as Manchu armies swept in from the north, court artists and scholars confronted a painful choice: align with the invading forces, or remain loyal to the old guard and face death or exile. Some Ming loyalists killed themselves rather than pledge themselves to the nascent Qing Dynasty. Others became Buddhist monks and wanderers who roamed the countryside, painting large narrative works that depict melancholic journeys across infinite-seeming landscapes.

These paintings have long been a source of fascination for the American illustrator Chris Russell, and they're the inspiration for his project of the last nine years: a series of figurative ink drawings that unfold across pocket-sized accordion notebooks, each measuring five and a half inches tall and more than one hundred and eight inches long when fully extended. He now has nine such notebooks, which merge into a seamless stream of interlocking images when placed end to end. Once, Russell found a particularly long hallway and laid out all the notebooks across the floor. The work in progress stretched over eighty-one feet. "It was a little overwhelming," he says.

Russell refers to his work as an "endless landscape" in a nod to the late Ming / early Qing compositions, particularly the masterful, elegiac work of Shitao, Kuncan, and Xiao Yuncong. When you relax your gaze, Russell's images take on the flowing topographical patterns of the paintings they're modeled after: clusters of form that rise into peaks between swathes of blank space suggesting clouds or sky or rising mist. On closer look, Russell's drawings resolve into intimately detailed portraits of the strangers who sit opposite him during his daily commute across New York City. They evoke not only the form but the feeling of the Chinese landscape paintings, that melancholic sensibility. "Portraiture is inherently melancholic," he says. "It's about trying to hold onto something that you know is gone already, or that you know is about to be gone."

The accordion notebooks also narrate a journey, a visual diary Russell has kept in the interest of maintaining a portable daily art practice. Scanned from left to right, the images serve as a record of Russell's travels and experiences, with references to museum exhibitions, rock concerts, meals with friends. They reveal the city's shifting demographics as he rides different subway lines throughout Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. They also chart the passage of time: Seasons change as his subjects add and subtract layers of clothing; technology changes as smart-phones become ubiquitous in the later volumes.

Russell draws from life, not memory. "What you're seeing in the drawing is whatever was in front of me at that time," he says. The most obvious challenge of drawing strangers on a moving train is that they may leave at any moment. When they do, Russell says he tries to "finish the thought," but he doesn't attempt a wholesale re-creation of what's no longer there. As a consequence, many of his portraits are unfinished: figures ghost into blankness, or into other figures. Noses, lips, and hands float disembodied through space; a pair of legs in half-laced boots vanishes where the knees should be. One face features a painstakingly detailed beard but lacks eyes and a nose. This lends the work a surreal, haunted quality. (In a spin-off project he calls "Subway Ghosts," Russell sketches riders on transparency paper. Once his subject has left the train, he holds up the sketch in the exact position where that person was sitting and photographs it.)

Scattered throughout these human landscapes are odds and ends Russell has observed elsewhere: a samurai suit from an armor exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the torn corner of a postage stamp, light bulbs, lizards, an entire David Hockney painting tucked behind the slouched bodies of commuters. Russell says he wants to create a sense...