Are you like many artists I meet who love working in layers, texture, and story, but avoid faces.
Do you feel drawn to them, curious even, but something holds you back.
For a long time, I felt that way too.
Before I ever picked up paint or tore paper for collage, I worked as a portrait photographer. For years, my job was to captures a person’s essence. To do this I had to really look at them. To notice the small things. The way a mouth softens when someone relaxes. The story that lives in a pair of eyes.
Faces felt familiar to me then. Natural, even.
And yet, when I moved into mixed media art years later, I avoided them completely.
I made women turned away. Figures without features. Silhouettes. I told myself I just wasn’t someone who could draw a face, and I didn’t question that story for a long time. It felt easier not to.
But somewhere along the way, something began to nudge at me, persistently.
In 2022, I finally listened.
I decided, somewhat bravely, that it would be my “year of the face.” I started a journal just for portraits. A place to just try.
Those early faces were awkward. Eyes closed. Noses redrawn again and again. Mouths painted over, covered up, softened, changed. I lost count of how many times I layered right over something that didn’t work and tried again.
Thankfully, mixed media is forgiving that way.
What surprised me most wasn’t that I got better technically. It was how personal the process felt. How slowly, as each face emerged, a sense of character and story did too. These weren’t perfect faces. But they felt alive and honest.
At some point, the faces stopped feeling like “portraits” and started feeling more like conversations. Like a way of sitting with a life, including my own, and letting it show itself in layers.
That year changed my relationship with my art.
I stopped thinking of faces as something to get right and started seeing them as something to meet. To sit with. To allow time.
I’m sharing this with you because I know how many artists carry the same hesitation I did. The wanting, paired with the doubt. The curiosity, paired with the fear of not being able to.
This is where something meaningful eventually grew for me. Not all at once. Slowly. Layer by layer.
I’ll share more soon about how this personal exploration became something I now guide others through as well. For now, I just wanted you to know where it began.
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With heart,
P.S. Yes I am re-releasing Personal Portraits as a pre-reccorded, self-paced workshop.
Yes I will be hosting my Open Studio Sessions again.
Stay tuned!!
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I live and create on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabeg peoples, lands that remain under their original stewardship. I honor their enduring connection to this place and their care for it over generations.
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