Drawings and other things

About

I've been drawing for as long as I can remember. I enjoy the challenge of capturing a subject's likeness, so most of my work is portraiture and figurative drawing made from both observation and reference. I've only recently started to try and wrap my head around painting.

Some of my earlier works leaned toward realism, but over time I've found I enjoy working somewhere between the defined and the undefined: letting some areas resolve into detail while others stay loose and suggested. I can attribute this interest to my studies of the 19th-century Impressionist movement, as well as the constant, underlying anxiety to work faster and make the most of every moment rather than get hung up on details. I work mainly with traditional mediums like graphite and charcoal. I occasionally draw or paint digitally, but in an age of AI-generated content, I find myself distancing myself from the computer and drawn even more to look, feel and sound of the physical mark.

Thanks to my high school art teacher Rhoda, who always pulled some strings to let me skip chemistry and stay in the art room longer than I was supposed to.

Thanks to Blake Cook, a great artist and dear friend, who, over the years, taught me far more than the craft itself. For teaching me to look, question, and to think about what it means to make in ways that were beyond me at the time.

This always comes to mind.

“Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.”

Patti Smith, Devotion