Fine Lines

Drake Carr's provocative artwork imbues fashion illustration with a louche glamour.

- Lynn Yaeger.

I love fashion, and I love drawing clothing,” says the rising art star Drake Carr. In early 2023, members of Carr’s extended family—everyone from stylist Dara Allen to downtown artist Rose Mori to club luminary “Connie Girl” Fleming to the models Karlie Kloss and Pat Cleveland—showed up in all their rarefied glory to have their portraits drawn by Carr during his ad hoc residency at the studio of his friend, the photographer Ethan James Green.

Carr’s drawings, paintings, and installations, at once unblinking and delicate, have an uncanny ability to distill the essence of his subjects. In an age of AI, where we are increasingly victims of bland manufactured content, the defiantly handmade quality of Carr’s work is subtly rebellious. As his friend Green puts it: “He manages to capture people in a way a lot of photographers can’t.”