Valleys Series

I've been drawing these since 2018 and I still am — charcoal and pastel on newsprint, from live models, in timed sessions that run from one minute to forty. Hundreds of them by now.

Newsprint is made to be used up, which is the point. You can carry a pad in and move through piece after piece without deciding anything is precious. Charcoal moves smoothly across it.

These are sketches in the working sense — made to develop and explore rather than to produce something. Newsprint isn't archival. It warms and yellows as it ages, and I like what that does with charcoal.

The name is geography. The studio where this style came together was in one of San Francisco's valley neighborhoods, and I lived in another. The city is all hills and valleys.

The numbers aren't a sequence — they're just the ones I kept.