This series began with a quote from Julius Caesar that fascinated me for months:

“No Cassius; for the eye sees not itself but by reflection, by some other things.”

I began to create photo-realistic portraits in which something was ‘revealed’ by burning away parts of the drawing. The idea of incorporating an unpredictable medium into a realistic style seemed to work really well.

This eventually evolved into using fire as the primary medium. The result was a body of work that seemed to capture the dichotomy of ephemerality and resilience in human experience. The pieces are incredibly fragile when rendered, the fire and soot having weakened the paper and burned some of it away. Yet, when completed with fiberglass cloth and resin to set the image, they become permanent and resolute.

Both the images produced from using fire and smoke to ‘draw’ and the statements I believe the final pieces to make were very important to me when working on this series.