I love to draw portraits. Faces draw the beholder in, revealing the spirit that resides within the subject. Lately I’ve been struggling to find faces interesting enough to draw. There’s a few celebrities I find interesting to draw, but then my work becomes “fan art.” I feel images of real people have something to offer that is much more sublime.

I shrink from air brushed perfection. It seems to be the one and only obsession in today’s culture. We cake on makeup, starve and carve ourselves to emulate some AI inspired ideal form that we were never meant to be. I want imperfection. In my subjects I search for evidence of hard traveling that can only be found in someone that has lived in the real world. I seek weary lines, crooked noses, lips that have spoken their truths. The lost, far away eyes that have seen the depths.

I love to sift through the pages of old National Geographic. I love the ethnicities, the individualities, the clues on the faces their ancestors left behind. A face is a story that must be told.

In the search of an interesting face to draw, I finally turned to my own. It is a face interesting enough if not conventional and it’s easily accessible in the archives of my camera roll. As I progressed I discovered I could either embellish or deconstruct myself in any way I pleased, which I found empowering. I used color like the Expressionists to convey mood and mystery. Maybe I’m not just a gray face in a crowd. Perhaps I’m a queen of flight or a green demon or nothing at all, just a rainbow shapeshifter traveling through a magical realm of my own creation.