Oil pastel on heavy weight paper

24” x 18”

Signed verso

I made this during my first few months in NYC — while living in the desert, my practice had been very much about finding the figure in the landscape. Once I got to the city, I started looking for landscapes in people, crowds of people, groups, trees as people, etc. I did a series of explorations around this idea in oil pastel, which I found to be particularly immediate, freeing, and had the intensity of color I have come to love.

Note: Studio sketches have been worked from and will often have imperfections: fingerprints and/or smudges, holes from the pins that held them to the wall, tiny splatters of paint, pieces of tapes or ripped edges. The sketches have often been worked from for larger paintings or used as inspiration for other work; the imperfections give the work character and show that they were well loved, used, and present in the artist’s studio.