This body of work takes the form of a two page book. Its beginnings are a product of countless hours spent in front of life drawing models. I've logged my time as both student and instructor. It's part of the process artists engage in as they learn their craft. There's something about a competently rendered drawing from a model that seems elegant and reassuring, a connection to a long tradition. But because of the nature of drawing from life and the demands upon the model in holding extended poses, there is usually a lack of tension to gestures and facial expressions and uniform "points of view". A predictability and conformity of product follows the process.

These drawings are part of a classical tradition that has largely lost its relevance. So the student of the figure ends up with stacks of drawings from twenty and forty minute poses, in pencil or charcoal, pastel or ink. They're no good to anyone but the artist as a record of the process of learning about proportion, anatomy, light logic and composition.

     In looking at my own record of this progress I found most of these drawings pretty awful. But some were reasonably good and seemed to ask me to do more with them. So I did. I started composing fictional biographies of the models in the drawings, and developing small and large oil paintings from this same work. Anyone whose spent time with the men and women who pose know them to be a pretty interesting group as a whole. I didn't think they deserved to have their likenesses destined to the lifeless two-dimensionality of figurative formalism alone, even if that formalism sometimes rises to the goal of being aesthetically compelling. The biographies and personal narratives I write for these two page books try to breathe a little life back into the subject, as well as documenting the times in which we live and their connections to the past.