In the Autumn of 2021, I decided to do a “Statue series”, which turned into four studies of famous statues. See if you can name them all! Answers at the bottom, after the images. These were all done with graphite on paper.

Did you guess them all?

No spoilers!!! Ready?

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1. We started off easy with Michaelangelo’s David
2. This is the eye of the Statue of Liberty! Actually, I sketched from one of the original prototypes, on display at the Statue of Liberty Museum in New York.
3. A section of the Trevi Fountain in Rome.
4. Le génie du mal by Guillaume Geefs. The story behind this is one of my favorite little art history anecdotes. The original statue of Lucifer was not this one; it was a work completed by Joseph Geefs, Guillaume’s brother. Joseph’s statue immediately caused a stir, with churchgoers and church administration exclaiming the statue was too beautiful. So they took the shamefully sexy statue down and commissioned another statue by Guillaume, who created an ostensibly sexier Lucifer. I guess they decided not to risk a third brother making something lethally sexy, because this is the statue that is still installed today.

How did you do??

For a few months in the winter of 2020-2021, I touched the sun and scored a gig with the Seattle Aquarium. I think I’ve peaked. I created over 20 images for a digital field guide, which can be found here: http://www.seattleaquarium.org/digital-field-guide. It was a challenging project, and I created some pieces I was truly proud of.

Something a little out of my usual style. I love bright colors, glow-in-the-dark paint, neon gel pens, iridescent markers, you name it. So of course I bought a pack of neon gel pens, and played with them. They are beautifully UV-reactive!

These are all gel pen on black paper.

The following two were inspired by the Peruvian quipu.

This one was inspired by some hagstones that were gifted to me by my best friend Sarah:

And this one is meant to be cells, attracted to the big cell with three “organelles”.

I drew this wallaby in April 2022, from a photo I took of a captive wallaby mama at Cougar Mountain Zoo in Issaquah, Washington.

These funny looking antelopes are known for their elephant-seal like snoot. This baby had its head in the snow, so I’ll just have to draw another Saiga to depict the wild nose!