Beta Male
The drawings contained in the Beta Male project were conceived and developed from an organic set of actions. Building off of, and responding to, a decade’s worth of exploration into self-portraiture, the work is a distillation down to potraiture’s essential visual components. Images of my face are tightly cropped, and limited to fundamentally the same position, with minor variations, in order to exhaust the possibilities of a prescribed, rigid concept. There exists an absurd quality and awkwardness in the pieces as I stare directly out at the viewer creating tension and a forced engagement.
The pieces operate as a counter to my work in printmaking. Familiar materials and techniques are adopted to create something fresh and new. The immediacy and directness of drawing operated in tandem with the modest scale to encourage production. The drawings returned my studio practice to a point of simplicity: pencil, paper, and representation.
