black pencil, chalk pencil

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black&white project for an illustration study

boxer

dance

The yacht shipwrecked off the coast of California, and Ader stayed in Los Angeles where he enrolled at Otis Art Institute. There he met Mary Sue Andersen, the daughter of the director of the school. They married in Las Vegas, where he used a set of crutches to symbolically prop himself up during the ceremony. Ader then taught art and studied philosophy at Claremont Graduate School. In 1970 he entered the most productive period of his career, beginning with his first fall film, which showed him seated on a chair, tumbling from the roof of his two-story house in the Inland Empire.
In 1975 Ader embarked on what he called “a very long sailing trip.” The voyage was to be the middle part of a triptych called “In Search of the Miraculous,” a daring attempt to cross the Atlantic in a 12½ foot sailboat. He claimed it would take him 60 days to make the trip, or 90 if he chose not to use the sail. Six months after his departure, his boat was found, half-submerged off the coast of Ireland, but Bas Jan had vanished.

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