IF - Cracked

For the past Illustration Friday topic "cracked" I decided to create a graphite drawing. Drawing was my first love in art, and I spent hours drawing growing up - especially portraits. I feel like I have pretty good facility with pencil and shading. I still love watching a piece come "alive" - even if it's not an animate subject. When faced with a blank piece of paper and a pencil, I feel like I am carving into the surface, not drawing on top of it.

Although, I do not draw as much as I once did, and portraits really are rare in my art, I find myself returning to graphite now and then. I have turned away from portraits in favor of these abstract, shallow-spaced pieces. They have been much influenced by my mixed-media, layering work I have done in the journal.

These pieces rarely contain representational imagery, but can hardly be called non-objective. They really are representations of identity and experience. The way we experience a moment or an event is such a complex mental, physical, and emotional amalgam. Our experiences and our identities are such rich, multi-level entities that I have focused on this idea in much of my recent artwork. This particular piece explores how such a complex structure can be so very fragile and prone to cracking. So for all it's balance, rigidity, and structure, this piece is on the verge of complete disintegration as the cracks begin to show.