Sam Guindon, 2021

The drawings done by Mora are very well expressed. They feature a collection of the artist’s friends, all of them done in pencil with loose dynamic lines and messy but readable shading. They cover the whole of a sketchbook page, torn out of the book as evidenced by its ragged edges on the top side. The faces are readable, but not overworked. Clearly, these sketches were the work of an artist comfortable with his craft, and not overly concerned with its completeness. The faces sketched represent Mora’s artist and art collector friends, and that fact is supported by the roughness of his drawings. This balance between looseness and readability communicates a familiarity with the figures, as Mora clearly isn’t striving to impress these people. His work lacks the tightness of a drawing done trying to flatter its subject, which indicates Mora sees himself as an equal in this social circle. Even the small abandoned figure on the left side supports this idea, as it has simply been allowed to exist on the page with no attempts to cover it up or expand upon it further. This looseness indicates that the sketchbook page was a more personal piece, not originally intended to be displayed publicly. This is also evidenced by the somewhat poor quality of the page, mainly due to a square discoloration in the lower right, as well as ripped top edge. Another interesting aspect of the drawing is that almost all of the faces are drawn from the same angle. As they are all done from a left side profile or ¾ profile, this indicates that Mora must have added to the sketch many times in order to fit in more faces, rather than sketching them from a single spot. Had he drawn them all from the same position, the faces would have been at a broader range of angles. Instead, the subjects are generally turned away to the left of the artist, and appear lost in conversation with someone else, maybe even each other. This gives the viewer of the collective sketches a feeling of separateness, like standing at the edge of a party and observing, exactly as Mora must have done.