______Up close, the portrait fractures into unreadable marks, gestures, and ghosts of emotion. From afar, something recognizable gathers—a face emerges, like a memory coming into focus. This shifting experience is central to my practice. I am 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 spirit, not through precision, but through distortion—the quiet chaos that lives beneath appearances. It is a presence felt, sensed, and remembered rather than merely seen through layered graphite, I work to give this aura weight and shape, allowing it to breathe through the texture of the page.The individuals I draw are not anonymized; they are specific and witnessed. Yet, through the layering of mark and erasure, they become vessels for something larger: the way we see and are seen, and the way we are made and unmade by time, memory, and perception. They are meditations on presence—on the beauty and impossibility of one ever truly knowing another. ............