Artists’ Statement:

A few weeks shy of my 32nd birthday I sat in my friends clawfoot tub and thought to myself “what if someone was right here, looking at me from my lap.” I took a picture with my phone and started to draw it in my sketchbook. I completed the whole thing in colored pencil and felt unsatisfied. It was controlled. Restricted. Trying too hard.

It needed space. It needed to be free. It needed to be big.

I picked up a single sheet of 18”x24” drawing paper from the art supply store, a box of 24 pastels, and a drawing board. I taped it up at the edges and started putting pencil to paper. I agonized over getting the face right. I applied the color, layer by layer until the pastel would no longer stick to the page. A week later when I finished it, I peeled it off the board, proud, inspired, and unsatisfied.

I can be more free.

What proceeded the initial drawing were continued attempts to free myself from creative constraints I’d established. In doing this, I discovered that those constraints existed in more places than just my art; such is life.

Each new drawing brought with it a new challenge: perspective, anatomy, color theory. While I attempted to master the technical aspects of drawing with pastel, I explored my own feelings about intimacy, vulnerability, worship, control, pleasure, boundaries, restraint, connection, and love. One drawing informed the next, that informed the next, that informed the next. A year later I had nine completed drawings, and I only hated one of them.

This series began as a practice in Personal Freedom and evolved into a study of what confines me. It is an ongoing project, both personally and creatively.