DRAWING ON WOOD
In his “drawing on wood” practice, the artist meticulously translates photographic observation into labor-intensive colored pencil renderings on wooden panels. This process—at once precise and deeply physical—creates a compelling interplay between human intention and the organic complexity of his chosen substrate. The wood is not merely a passive surface; its knots, grain, and textures actively disrupt and inform the drawing process. Each line must negotiate with the living memory of the material, creating a tension between control and surrender, between the artist’s hand and nature’s own mark-making. “I’m drawn to the relationship between image and substrate,” he explains. “The wood’s grain doesn’t just interrupt the image—it shapes it, informs it, becomes part of its story. It’s not just about representing something—it’s about resonating with it.”
This approach aligns with a long lineage of artistic exploration that treats the surface as more than neutral ground. As art historian James Elkins writes in The Object Stares Back, “A surface is not a void; it is already full of suggestion, resistance, and presence. When an artist draws on a material like wood, they’re not just adding an image—they’re entering into a conversation with what is already there.” By choosing wood as both medium and metaphor, the artist positions the act of drawing as an act of listening and responding—amplifying the natural grain as a co-author of the work.
Engaging deeply with post-photographic discourse, his work questions the place and purpose of the image in an era defined by speed, repetition, and digital saturation. Where photography captures in a fraction of a second, his process insists on slowness, on touch, on endurance. The drawings are acts of resistance—pushing against the ephemeral nature of screen-based imagery and reasserting the material weight of images in physical space. This slow, tactile labor becomes a form of meditation, a way of reclaiming time in image-making.
By re-materializing photographic images through hand-rendered marks on wood, he blurs the boundaries between reproduction and invention. The result is neither a photograph nor a traditional drawing, but a hybrid form that destabilizes the image’s historical claim to objectivity and permanence. In this space, memory is no longer fixed but fluid—woven into the shifting textures of the wood, shaped by the rhythms of the hand. Each work becomes a site of ongoing negotiation between perception, materiality, and meaning. In this way, his drawings are less about preserving a captured moment and more about reanimating it—offering a space where the past flickers through the present, and the surface itself becomes a field of resonance.
