A friend of mine, Jennifer Orkin, also known as the Instagram phenomenon, August Wren, proposed an Instagram challenge to draw / paint as many small portraits in the month of March. I am drawing my portraits from memory. Drawing from memory is a pleasure: I start making some marks and just know which are right and which are not. I erase the wrong ones until I recognize a feature or pose and which way the person is facing. I keep going like that until I am thinking about it more directly. They are really portraits over a collective memory. In this one of my father, I found an eye from when I was a child, taut healthy skin from when he was older, a lip when he was sternly thinking—and his signature expression of eye brows which just got more and more intense until his eye brow hairs got thinner and fell out. The process is identical to drawing my dreams. Here are a few of the ones I have done. The subjects are people I admire.

Kristin Jones

Ellen Hunt Harrison

Peter Lynch

John Hejduk