I love portraiture (faces take up the majority of my sketchbook pages) and my favourite medium is plain graphite, but in recent years I have branched out to different mediums (oil paints, sculpture, cut-and-paste letters, embroidery…) and subject matter, and even more recently, I have reverted back to my go-to mechanical pencil. (0.5 HB or 2B lead for canvas, and 0.3 HB lead for sketchbook paper.) Leaving comfort zones isn’t always the move, and there’s something about the way graphite works that makes me yearn to use it even when I am painting or working digitally.

It might simply be that it’s what’s easiest for me; after all, I’ve been using pencils since I was taught how to write, and I’ve been drawing even longer than that, and the sharpness of the lead of a mechanical pencil allows for a precision that a paintbrush or charcoal stick can’t provide.

But it’s messy, especially when I work on canvas, my preferred material. The roughness of the canvas turns the graphite to dust that sticks to everything: the ground, my hands, my face, my workplace, my glasses. I have to blow the dust to get it out of the way, and it turns to a cloud that turns the end of my nose grey. The side of my right hand turns grey and smears unerasable dust across my paper or canvas (the reason I work from the left to the right of my piece after the initial sketch is done), and the sound of my pencil running backandforthandbackandforth over the paper or canvas is grating, and infuriating.

But it takes care— care that I find to be worth the scraping of graphite on canvas and grey-stained skin. Even when I’m sketching mindlessly or shading messily before I go in with more detail, I have to be careful and meticulous, and as I work, I form a relationship with my art piece. Maybe it's as dramatic as humanly possible, but I feel as though I rely on it as much as it relies on me. One cannot exist without the other.

It’s important to me that this relationship presents itself in my art, that my work is not careless or clumsy, but that my viewer can see how much care I put into it, how much time I spent practising and practising in order to complete this piece. And I hope for my viewers to feel similarly to me, for them to feel a sort of relationship with my work as they look at it.

The text of my poetry being small or messily written is intentional, not the product of me having bad penmanship (though I suppose that’s up for debate); I want my viewers to have to look closely, to put in effort to read and comprehend my words. I often have the text written elsewhere in a format easier to read just in case, but I find that if my viewer cannot bother to read the text or doesn’t care enough to try, the piece simply was not for them.

In recent years, my work has revolved around themes that are heavier and darker: grief, resentment between man and God, rage. Which are all, obviously, intense, and I do love softer themes and imagery too— Love in all its forms, eyes sparkling under smiles, the domesticity of home— but it can’t be denied that the intensity of existentialism and all-powerful emotions strike a little louder of a chord in people, both audience and creator.

I love surrealism even though I work primarily with realism, and I try to evoke the same response that surrealism usually gets from a viewer in my own work. Unsettling is a compliment to me when it’s in regards to my original pieces.

As I said earlier, I love portraiture. I love faces, and I’m known for often stating that I like someone’s nose, or their ears, or something else that would sound entirely unhinged without the context of me being a portrait artist. I adore diversity and the vast amount of differences that exist in our species, and I find beauty in every face I see. Eyes are usually my favourite feature of a person’s face, and they have been for as long as I can remember. (I was that kid in grade school, doodling eyes on my worksheets instead of paying attention.)

And, as I’ve said probably too many times now, I love mundanity, which I find in people. Each eyelash, each freckle, every stray strand of hair and crease lingering in skin— it all holds a beauty found only in people: lingering traces of the lives people have lived, of the years they’ve managed to keep. Every smile and laugh, furrowed eyebrow and scrunched nose, staying behind, a life lived visibly.

And it’s the same with what isn’t formed naturally, what isn’t given to a person as their welcome
gift upon arrival. Makeup and tattoos, haircuts, jewellery, clothing. Not quite traces of years and feelings, but representations of who the person is, and who they want to be. I try to capture it

all, including whatever shine is in their eyes.

I love love. I find it in everything I do, everything I write, everything I draw, and I do my best to show

my viewers the love that I have felt so deeply while creating.