May 4, 2021 - ongoing
I began making these charcoal drawings sometime in May of 2021. They were created as a response to the on and off again relationship with oil paint. I wanted to be able to use a medium, that quite frankly, I didn’t care as much for. I wanted a medium that that would be forgiving and was easy to handle, where I could focus on making an image and less about the technical aspects behind it.
The first few drawings were part of my midnight art practice. I would go into the studio late into the night, at a time where I could get lost in the art. I would play all sorts of new age instrumental music, set up some still lifes or pull out some references from my Ikebana book collection and create.
When I first started making these I would talk about them as sketches, but the reality was that I was very fond of these drawings. These drawings held an essence of myself that felt fluid. I knew these pieces were not sketches, they were drawings and they were the best work I had made in the studio up until this point. These drawings also did something for me oil could not do at the time, they took me to a flow. Charcoal took me out of my head, the medium provided the most direct path of articulating the visions I had for the work. I took up a relationship with charcoal, seeing it as a fellow collaborator.
You can view the entier collecion at full scale here. :)
