Everyday Sketches

Much of my sketching experience has come from the immediate world around me. The commencement of a sketch could be provoked by the moments when I was bored and needed something to do, along with those sublime moments when, in the midst of my mundane experience, I unexpectedly saw something which I decided that wanted to remember. Creating such works does not demand any kind of drastic change or departure from one’s ordinary routines and lifestyle, no great upheaval or sacrifice for the sake of art, but rather a concession; it requires the courage to accept your everyday life and then transform it through your drawing.

Although the acts of creating these sketches took place in a mundane world of classrooms, doctors’ offices, and lazy Saturday afternoons, the resulting works exhibit an interesting similarity to my more formal travel drawings of exotic destinations in Paris or Spain. Where those travel drawings attempted to make the foreign familiar, as I dissected the essences of buildings that I had never seen before and made a place for them in my own personal memory, my investigations of more mundane subjects involved taking such a close and intimate look at the surroundings I was already familiar with that those things and places could become foreign again. These drawings, too, are travel sketches, and their only difference is that most of the traveling involved has occurred in my mind.