With my portraits I attempt to create a strong sense of mood.  In my portraits of others I, strive to capture their emotions – for me the eyes are the most important conveyor of that information.  In my self-portraits, I generally aim at communicating anger or melancholia.  They are the moods that make people very unstable and cause them to act irrationally und unpredictably.  

My drawings are a way for me to clear my head and sort out my thoughts. I put all my energy into a drawing until I can calm down and think about my problems rationally.  This allows me to come up with a better solution and keeps me from acting on my emotions and doing something I will later regret.  

            My portraits are graphite on paper and my graphite application conveys the idea of fragility.  I sketch out my subject and then apply powdered graphite with a paper towel to roughly block in my sketch. At this stage, my drawing looks like a cloud of dust or smoke that is being blown away by the wind.  Then I use a soft pencil and a kneaded eraser to pull the drawing out of this cloud.  My biggest influence in the way I use the graphite has been Peter Traugott who uses a similar procedure to create his drawings.