Archive: Artwork
February 2020
This was one of my first times ever painting and ever depicting an entire face. A month prior, I had gotten oil paints for the first time for my birthday. At this point, I was still new to oil paint as a medium and mixing colors.
In this piece, I was inspired by the end segment of Call Me By Your Name and wanted to capture the raw emotion in Timothee Chalamet’s performance.
April 2020
Into quarantine, I explored painting a little bit more, focused on mixing and placing values and color more so than content. Using cheaper oil paints and canvas boards from a craft store, I started to figure out how to handle paint in a way that made sense to me – although it was still relatively new to me.
October 2021
This sketch was for a larger piece for a freshman year class. I used oil pastels for the first time in this because the class itself was about material exploration.
At this point, I was weeks away from starting Testosterone and thinking about starting to make work about being transgender. This reflects the beginning of that direction in my work and was the first stepping stone in what would soon consume my practice.
March 2022
This is a sketch for a life drawing class in the spring of my freshman year. Not super saturated with meaning or significance, it just shows the evolution of my depiction of the body.
March 2022
This is another sketch from life drawing, focused more on lines, mass, and contour than larger forms.
May 2022
At this point, I just drew whatever I liked aesthetically. Not too much thought went into the work I was making at this point because assignments were less self directed. Taking pictures from Pinterest and drawing them was the most immediate way for me to practice drawing, which I took full advantage of.
June 2022
This was one of the first times I ever took a reference photo of my own body and depicted it. It was a transitionary period for me – I was 8 months on Testosterone and just starting to feel more at home in my body, so I decided to explore that in my sketchbook.
June 2022
Likewise, in this sketch, I was intrigued by my changing body and documenting it through my artistic practice. I was still getting used to these new changes, such as bottom growth, which is what this sketch depicts. As a way for me to process and reflect on the changes that came with HRT, I drew these small parts of my body.
July 2022
As time went on, I began taking more and more of my own reference photos. This sketch explored the idea of coding more so than previous sketches, featuring a bottle of Testosterone gel – something that most people wouldn’t immediate be able to identify, but trans people would easily recognize.
August 2022
As I started my sophomore year of college and entered the Drawing major, I remained interested in these ideas I had been thinking about. Focused again on the phenomenon of bottom growth and how incredible it was to me, I used my own reference photo to continue this self-documentation.
October 2022
This sketch was for a painting assignment where we had to draw a portrait of ourselves from observation and then translate that into a painting. Instead of a traditional bust, I decided to focus the self-portrait on my chest. It weighed heavily on my mind and body – especially because my top surgery was scheduled for December, and it became more and more unbearable.
October 2022
This quick painting was the first rendition of turning the previous sketch into a painting. It was meant to be practice before we touched the canvas itself, allowing us space to figure out color palette, mark-making, and other stylistic elements.
December 2022
The first thing I did after taking my bandages off for the first time after top surgery was take photos, which would then turn into sketches, drawings, and paintings. So struck by this monumental change, making artwork about it acted as a mediation. It helped me really understand how grateful I was for the changes happening to me in my medical transition.
May 2023
This sketch is mainly focused on mark-making. Turning away from color in drawing, I was more interested in the soft, hatching effect of graphite and what that could bring to a piece. This little drawing depicts a penis going into a fleshlight – something that, at the time, I was so jealous of, both sensationally and in terms of my own body.
August 2023
These are prints I made by putting paint directly onto my body and then pressing it into the paper. Although these acted more as material tests, I was also interested in the physical evidence that a body and individual could leave behind, which is something I would eventually explore in different ways.