The Human Face
Medium: Graphite
Size: 11 x 14 inches each
Year: 2026
An ongoing series of graphite portraits - some drawn from photographs, some from people I know. Graphite lets me concentrate on how light falls across a face, and every set of features demands something different. I spend the most time on the eyes, building up highlights and reflections until they hold the drawing together. Working this way has taught me how individual features combine into a face that reads as one person.
Songs of Love and Hate
Medium: Charcoal
Size: 17 x 23.5 inches
Year: 2025
A charcoal drawing of Leonard Cohen surrounded by lyrics, made as a tribute to both the artist and my father. Growing up, my dad sang Cohen's songs to me, and those moments shaped how I hear music and poetry. Every lyric here was chosen for a specific memory of listening with him. I worked in charcoal for its range and rawness - deep black against bare white felt right for the vulnerability in Cohen's writing. The piece honors his legacy and the history his music gave us.
Memento Mori
Medium: Mixed media
Size: 11 x 14 inches
Year: 2026
A skull surrounded by flowers and butterflies, conveying both decay and growth in the same frame. The tradition this belongs to usually points one direction, toward mortality; I was more interested in what grows out of it. I shaded the skull in watercolor pencil, my first time with the material, which let me build softer transitions than I could get otherwise. Colored pencil creates the flowers and butterflies; charcoal in the background pushes the contrast.
Things I See
Medium: Acrylic
Size: 20 x 16 inches
Year: 2026
A representational painting of my room seen from my bed, looking toward the desk and wall where I keep artwork, mementos, and the objects I've held onto. It's the view I see most often and pay the least attention to. I painted it in acrylic to capture the small details that make the space mine.
The Same Place
Medium: Watercolor
Size: 14 x 11 inches
Year: 2026
This piece preserves a meaningful moment between my friend and my cat. My room is an important space to me; I created this painting from the same perspective as an earlier piece, this time showing a new memory. I used watercolor and focused on the details that make my room feel familiar, including the objects in my room, my friend, and my cat. I chose not to show their faces because I wanted to focus on the interaction, capturing the comfortable familiarity of their relationship.
The Golden Ratio
Medium: Acrylic
Size: 18 x 24 inches
Year: 2026
A gathering of plants and animals whose forms approach the golden ratio, including the spiral that humpback whales trace when they feed in Antarctica. I built the image by glazing transparent acrylic in layers over an underpainting of spiral coral, so the structures read through one another. The subject has stayed with me since a fourth-grade teacher showed me the Fibonacci sequence and where it turns up in nature - the same pattern arriving independently in unrelated living things.
Perspective
Medium: Graphite
Size: 20 x 15 inches
Year: 2026
An interior broken into pattern. I drew the room first, then worked back over it in graphite, replacing each surface with its own repeating mark - the bed, the window, the walls, the floor all rendered in different systems. No two surfaces use the same pattern, which meant inventing a new one each time a plane turned. The perspective holds even as the surfaces come apart. I was after the point where a space stays legible while almost nothing in it is described directly.
Things I Keep
Medium: Mixed media
Size: 11 x 14 inches
Year: 2026
Objects I've kept, and what they hold. A wooden elephant from my father, named for my childhood nickname, Horton. A bag handmade by Anxious, who I met on a cruise when I was five. Teddy, the bear I've had since I was six, who still sleeps on my bed. A painted rock from a close friend. An amethyst heart from a former babysitter I've known as long as I can remember. An elephant painting my dad made while in Africa. I rendered them in charcoal, oil pastel, and pen, shifting between cubes and dots so each object sits in its own visual register.
Act VI
Medium: Pen
Size: 11 × 14 inches (8 papers, one shown)
Year: 2026
An invented sixth act for Twelfth Night, written and drawn after finishing the play and wondering what happened next. The characters go on watching and spying on each other, extending the misunderstandings the original never quite resolves. I worked in pen and ink, building depth through shading and linework. Each design carries the character: Cesario and Sebastian are drawn near-identical, and Feste's costume marks him as the fool.
Pocket Atlas
Medium: gouache on playing cards
Size: 3.5 x 2.5 inches each, 13 cards
Year: 2026
I travel constantly with my family, and I photograph everywhere I go. This piece turns those photos into a deck of cards, each one a place that mattered. I cut homemade brushes small enough to hold detail at that scale. It was my first time working in gouache, and I kept over blending until the colors went muddy; learning to stop earlier is what gave the cards their clarity. I liked the idea of carrying a set of small, collectible memories around with me.
Inventory
Medium: Mixed media
Size: 20 x 20 inches
Year: 2026
A collage of the symbols and relationships that shape how I think and make work. A graphite self-portrait sits among oil pastel drawings of my cat and his stuffed cat, arranged along mathematical patterns. In colored pencil: paintbrushes, my childhood teddy bear, and references to music and Leonard Cohen. The quote comes from It's a Wonderful Life, which my family watches every Christmas. The hard part was holding so many media in one piece, which forced me to be deliberate about where each thing went.
Twins
Medium: Gouache
Size: 11 × 14 inches
Year: 2026
A portrait of twin sisters, close friends of mine, built from childhood photographs alongside recent ones. The two childhood panels share a single warm gold ground, while the adult portraits sit in separate palettes, one warm and one cool - the two of them growing into different palettes as they aged. I worked in gouache for its saturation, and repeated the striped and spiral patterns across all four panels to hold them together as one piece.
About My Drawing and Painting:
My work asks viewers to notice what they have stopped seeing - the expression in someone's eyes, a gesture between friends, a room you pass through every day.
I keep an ongoing collection of hyper-realistic charcoal and graphite portraits, studying the face through specific marks: moles, freckles, individual hairs. I want to understand what makes a person immediately recognizable, and how features, expressions and gestures carry personality. Alongside those studies, I have made a group of works about the relationships in my life, where ordinary interactions hold weight because of the memory attached to them.
Before I draw, I study a subject from several angles and work through grayscale studies until I understand what makes it distinct. Then I choose the material for what it emphasizes: graphite and charcoal for the range of values, pen for precision, acrylic for vibrancy, oil pastel for texture. Layering, texture, and color change how a subject is understood, and I pick the material that supports the quality I want to bring forward.