Richard Haines draws from life, at speed, mostly of people who are not posing. He has done it from the front row in Milan and Paris and on the street outside his studio in Brooklyn, and the two are the same act, which is the point of him. The one work on this page is a figure in profile, mid-stride, hood up. The upper body is worked heavily and dark. Everything below the waist is left as line, and nothing has been gone back over. It is signed HAINES in capitals at the lower right.
Biography
Haines grew up in Richmond, Virginia, studied graphics at art school there, and went to New York in the mid-1970s to draw. He started as an assistant illustrator at Vogue Patterns and then spent some three decades as a designer instead, at Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis, Bill Blass, and Sean John. In 2008 the design work went away with the economy. He moved to Bushwick, started a blog called What I Saw Today that was nothing but drawings of people he passed, and Prada saw it. The year that followed produced Il Palazzo, a book of roughly 150 drawings made around the house’s 2012 men’s collection. He has since drawn for Dries Van Noten, Hermès, and Vogue, and works in charcoal, pastel, watercolor, and ink on paper.
In the collection’s words
Haines is here in collaboration with Daniel Cooney Fine Art, the gallery that represents him, which moved from New York to Santa Fe in 2025. There is work of his at Webster Collection now.
He has spent some thirty years making garments and close to twenty drawing them. He knows where a cuff sits, which is what allows him to leave it out.
The heavy passage in this drawing is the hood and the shoulders. Everything else is line. It is a decision, made in the few seconds available, about what the figure actually consists of. Work made afterward from photographs, he has said, is never the same thing.
Patrick McFarlin painted more than three hundred Santa Fe locals from life between 1994 and 1996, one sitter at a time, in a downtown club. Different city, different century, the same conviction.
Continue exploring
- Patrick McFarlin, who drew this town one sitter at a time
- The fine art collection and all artists at Webster Collection
- Webster Collection
- The Library, where we write up the collections in Paris and Milan that Haines draws from the front row
