I’m steadily producing new pencil drawings based on outlines of my body or body parts. These activities feel like a starting point even if there is a lot of ambivalence about where they might lead.
In reading back on other blog posts, I’m reminded that the thing that drew me to self-portraiture was the elusiveness of identity. In making these works, I’ve enjoyed the exercises of drawing around the outline of my arm and then moving my hand and fingers and redrawing an outline over the top. Sometimes I also draw around the shadows that my hands cast on the paper. Theses images feel animated and capture the ephemerality of the body in motion. Depending on the colour of the paper, the use of different pencils and quality of line – hard or soft, these images can seem like optical illusions. It’s as if the hands are are waving back at me.
