Portrait Sketches

Quick sketches done every night, except the first, of January, 2023.

The constraints of this project were: find a candid photograph of an individual online in under an hour, sketch said image in under 30 minutes, finish the sketch before midnight, post said sketch online immediately after midnight. No erasing and no retouching allowed. All final works are sketched in charcoal and on 16lb 11x22" bond paper.

The purpose of all this was to highlight, perhaps as a continuation of my observation of other artists, or of my own practice even, the ways in which our understanding of reality have shifted as a result of technologies that allow for retouching, obscuring, thwarting, and even manipulating our senses exist to replace our human faculties for doing so. None of this is new, as the practice of creating art in and of itself is an exercise in manipulation of reality. The most prevalent technologies lately, however, exist to further distort our understanding of what it means to both be a practitioner of art and whether or not art (among other human created media) requires a human at all for its inception.

You will find examples of these kind of artificial images that I've experimented in generating elsewhere in my portfolio. Even in those cases, I chose to constrain myself to using only open-source and offline versions of certain AI/ML augmented software, that I had to install and then train models for, or otherwise customize personally, in order to have some "hand" in the creation of the works.

These works below serve to illustrate that, without the use of any apparatus, with which to perfect human generated imagery, we find imperfections abound. I welcome these imperfections, because it is in the improvisation that (with my brain at least) attempts to perform corrections produce perhaps what can be considered illustrations of reality that are more true or "honest" than what the most complex image sensors can reproduce.

The mediums through which we view the world color our perception in ways our brains cannot objectively articulate.