MY WORK ATTEMPTS TO COMPLICATE the pleasure of looking. The edible quality of flesh, its thick perfections rendered with palpable ardor, splinters away into suet. I employ trappings of commodity and exploitation, fogged then by the figure’s self-possessed and empowered mien. In these images, I attempt to illustrate the proximity of beauty to ugliness, pleasure to suffering, and sexual excitement to disgust. My hope is to exonerate viewers from boxed notions of sexuality, to trounce what cultural programming has told us about the colors and assemblages and habits of bodies.

For me, there is nothing in the world more compelling than the human face and body. There is nothing more resonantly beautiful and likewise nothing more cumbersome or complex. Our bodies are crafted by an arbitrary and remote lottery of ancestral strains. All our lives, we must pursue a symbiosis of interior and exterior wherein we truly own, inhabit, and become synonymous with our encasements. I want to activate empathy with my drawings, inviting viewers to reappraise their own conditions of being in a body.

I draw the face as the animate microcosm of the individual, mapping his/her unique odyssey of life. I seek out manifestations of feeling, character, and history in the form of the body and in its carriage, finding where time and experience have amassed like moss in tree bark. My drawings attempt to transcribe the person, celebrating his/her total singularity, while discussing larger problems of the everyman.

"MS. MALNOROWSKI, BY THE WAY, THAT'S A SHAME ABOUT YOUR FACE."
- "THERE'S NOTHING THE MATTER WITH MY FACE. I GOT CHARACTER."