100 days · light sketches

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Everything had just shut down, and a friend, Ahad, and I started trading a drawing a day to keep each other working at something. I was applying to grad school for architectural lighting design and wanted to teach myself to see light and shadow well enough to set them down on paper; drawing has never been my strength. So I gave myself a hundred days of it, one after another. Most of mine begin with a photo I took on my phone. I found it easier to let the phone do the first translation into two dimensions, rather than my own eye. The series opens and closes on the same images, a way to see whether anything had changed in between. Some days the drawing is patient. Others were made fast and late, when I realized I still owed the day its page. It turned into a study of repetition and discipline as much as of drawing. Even a small drawing gets taxing when you make it without end. The boredom works on you, though: you reach for a different technique because you can't stand to repeat yesterday.