Customed Portraits

It seems that drawing without stopping since the age of fourteen can turn a person into a kind of human printing press—and there is deep pleasure in that. When I draw portraits, time loosens its grip. The world around me grows quiet, almost asleep, and I stay with the patient act of gathering strokes, line by line, until they become a person—a whole inner world, layered with nuance and contradiction. I return to the image again and again, unwilling to let it go until the portrait begins to breathe, carrying the precise essence of the person and the complexity of the moment held within the photograph.