Wilfrid Wood has been drawing his boyfriend and muse, Theo Adamson, since 2016. The resulting pictures — Mr. Adamson posing provocatively, snoring on the sofa, picking his nose — were brought together for Mr. Wood’s show “Drawings of My BF” in 2019. As I stood among these portraits, I realized I was seeing Mr. Adamson in a way I’d experienced only with my ex-boyfriend in our quieter moments of intimate togetherness.
In the process of making the short documentary above, I came to see that the romantic gesture that at first seemed so grand, an entire exhibition dedicated to a lover, was eclipsed by each small gesture and fleeting moment — hundreds of quiet expressions of everyday joy. Life is something we just get on with, leaving traces and imprints as we go. And sometimes hundreds of drawings of one person are the beautiful result.
James Cooper is a British filmmaker currently working in Tokyo.
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