In 2023, I really wanted to draw my face. Okay, I admit the conditions were a little more nuanced than that. What I truly intended to do was to paint straightforward master studies, really brush up on my painting skills. But parsing through all those oil-caked tableaus I started deliberating about the faces throughout history that we see time and time again and the portraits we herald as great testimonies to these artists and how many of them are white and male. So many of the pieces we study in art and illustration history, don’t look anything like me and with that in mind, I set out to center ~myself in all these works as somewhat of a statement to say “Hey I’m here and I exist too.”