Drawings of Campus Cuties

These drawings began as a kind of palette cleanser, a way back to slow looking after working with tools and processes that move fast. Each one starts with a Campus Cutie, a mass-produced figurine small enough to hold in one hand, enlarged to portrait scale in graphite on Rives BFK paper, bordered in gold leaf.

At this scale, something shifts. The faces that were fixed and identical in plastic become individual. Nightie Night looks jaded and bone-tired. Stormy Weather gives a smirky side-eye. Others are harder to read: watchful, resigned, quietly somewhere else. They are still figurines. They are also, somehow, people.

In every other body of work, these figures are assigned a role, a category, a name. Here they are not. The graphite finds texture and weight where the original object had only gloss. The gold leaf frames them like portraits that matter. This is where they rest..

Rives BFK paper, graphite, gold leaf. 2016-ongoing.