ALL WORK I CREATE IS founded on one principle to which I am direly committed, in art as in life: there is nothing in the world more compelling than the human face. And there is nothing more problematic, more cumbersome, or more complex.
    I have been feverishly working to render this complexity since the age of four, and my dedication has never waned. My brand of portraiture binds artistic sensibility, human feeling, and critical theory. I have honed my intellect and my hand with equal and acute diligence all of my life, forever immersing myself completely in work and study. In doing so, I've come to understand and harvest the drive I have always felt, and always followed, to draw portraits.

    Though across cultures and histories portraits are made to glorify, to me they encapsulate a special kind of cognitive dissonance. The essential problem of the face is that its assemblage is arbitrary and remote. It is the sum of ancestral strains pulled by lottery. As such, our faces are not ours at all. They are yielded of an unknowable lineage, populated by people we have never met but to whom we owe our very being, our very bodies, owning us tacitly, marking us indelibly. Yet we accept our faces as the mastheads of our personae.
    I am deeply concerned with this problem of ownership.

    When I draw a face, I am mining for that relationship, disclosed in its carriage and movement. I employ the face as the animate microcosm of the individual and as the map of his/her unique odyssey of life. I seek a look of frankness from which I can transcribe the person in a language of line and shadow. Idiosyncrasy whispers the correspondences between the interior and the exterior, demonstrating where the person within has informed the person without, and vice versa. Whether working from life or a handful of photos, I am wringing what I see for that slippage of timidity or confidence, conviction or apology. I am wringing for sexuality and how it is given, how it is operated. I am wringing for those little glimmers that turn my heart or turn my stomach. I delicately exaggerate and I capitalize Subtleties as I translate this person through myself. Whenever my work supersedes the face, it moves to incorporate the body, locating all of these same traits in the greater landscape of the person.

    And yet, for all of the special, terrible uniqueness of the face, it is also the picture of commonality and ubiquitous understanding. It is the site at which all people identify, allowing us to "see", to "know" one another. Our faces are our aptest means of communication, transcendent of word and time. We read volumes when we look into another's face, and we see ourselves there though it is foreign, matchless - thereby knitting us as a species.

    In my career as an artist, I have been advised to draw in some more convoluted metaphor. But I hold that the human face and figure are perfect metaphors for larger notions and information, and hope to prove it.

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