Original Figure Drawing, “Portrait of Morgan”, ink on paper, 8 x 12”, 2020

This portrait of model Morgan was made from life, at an Open Studio held by Gage Academy of Art in Seattle.  Figure drawing and figure painting has been at the core of my fine art practice since first taking a figure drawing class from the live nude model in 1999.  To challenge myself, I’ll sometimes work without a safety net, so to speak, to draw with permanent (non-erasable) media, focusing on idiosyncrasies of the model, a portrait, rather than to patiently construct the whole figure using a more forgiving media like charcoal or graphite, which can be erased and refined.  This portrait is a contour study in marker, one of my favorite and most versatile media to sketch with - marker can give a large dark area quickly in full black, but can also be used to create texture, line of any width, and a depleted marker can even give shades of gray instead of the color black of its fresh ink.  Improvised work like this stands on innumerable sessions over decades of much more carefully constructed and refined drawings - the rigor of those practices allowing me to occasionally cut loose and try to make work a bit more “on-sight”, rather than planning my route.

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