______"These studies begin with a face—a real, living presence. From there, I endeavor to dissolve it. Through graphite, I work toward something that cannot be fully held. An image that slips between abstraction and clarity, noise and form, intimacy and distance. Up close, the portrait fractures into unreadable marks, gestures, ghosts of emotion.But from afar, something recognizable gathers—a face emerges, almost photographically, like a memory coming into focus. This shifting experience is central to my practice. I’m not interested in likeness alone, but in how a soul lingers within a face—how the essence of a person resists being captured yet longs to be seen. Each drawing is an effort to convey the infinite depth of the human soul, not through precision, but through distortion—through the quiet chaos that lives beneath appearances. It’s not always seen with the eyes, but felt, sensed, remembered. Through layered graphite, I work to give this aura weight and shape, to let it breathe through the distortion.. The individuals I draw are not anonymized; they are specific, witnessed. And yet, through the layering of mark and erasure, they become vessels for something larger: the way we see and are seen, the way we are made and unmade by time, memory, and perception. They are meditations on presence—on the beauty and impossibility of ever truly knowing another." ............