Enjoyed sketching from Simon Vouet's Saint Sebastian (c. 1625) this afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts. After viewing other areas of the Museum with my students, I decided to look around some areas of the permanent painting collection I hadn't walked through in quite some time, and the feminine gesture and contrast in value of this work caught my attention.

It's really been a joy these past few weeks diving back into drawing and watercolor on paper and working more abstractly. Although I enjoy working from observation, my heart is not into it right now. My current drawings and watercolors, however, have evolved organically from my more representational and photo-based work; with them, there was a need to preserve an intimate moment of seeing some found form through a recording of the form and a paring down of its surroundings. The paring down of the surrounding background became more and more of my primary interest as a means to visually convey contemplation through marks that simultaneously veiled unnecessary information and physically encircled the object in focus. Now, I am exploring imagined object/ground compositions which still fixate on a singular object and this idea of layering, but now the object and ground are starting to fuse together as the layering is not an editing process but a building up of stacked planes as if I'm constructing these little flat sculptures one wash or pencil layer at a time.