CASTRO DRAWINGS

Colored Pencil/Graphite
2020

My drawn projects are responses to my compulsion to connect with specific environments I call ‘home’. through a process of intense scrutiny, in those cases, using graphite. In “Castro Drawings”, San Francisco joins Winnipeg and North Carolina as a place where I exercise a profound need to ground myself in the organic details close to where I sleep. Through my hermetic practice of daily walking and drawing, my expressions have shifted from the bleak greyscale of the Winnipeg winter and the suffocating density of Winston-Salem NC, to the compact and vibrant gardens of the Castro district. Reflective of my steep and compressed neighborhood, natural growth in this unique urban context is largely confined to tiny hidden plots, clusters of crowded pots and succulents tightly hug the stairs, windowsills and sidewalks. Black burgundies, blush and fuchsia pinks and creamy mint native plants with explosive projectiles evoke an otherworldliness, close to my residence. My relationship with these plants is intimate, linked through a mutual need to be fixed and occupy even the smallest and contrived of domains, yet from that safety buck and strain in surprising and courageous ways. This series meticulously draws out this paradox.