passing through

Depicting someone that I see on the bus allows me a small window into the inner life of a stranger, forcing me to ask myself more about who they are, what they care about, and how they might be feeling. I’ve been doing life drawings on the bus for around a year at this point, and now felt like as good a time as any to attempt to immortalize these often quick drawings in my sketchbook. My muses for this project are all people that I’ve come to know on the 7 Haight-Noriega. There’s a rotating cast of 15 or so people whose faces I’ve drawn over and over again on my way to school or class each morning and afternoon, and I want to capture some of the beauty I feel is living in the unconventional relationship that you have with the people on your bus. The bus also always feels like a special gathering spot because it's a very fleeting context to meet other people (by definition being on the bus typically means your goal is to get off the bus), an amalgamation of a lot of different types of people all briefly in the same space. I’d like for the audience to be able to walk around the people that are hung drawings, maybe even in a way that’s a bit cramped or inconvenient– the interactivity aspect is important to me because the feeling I’m trying to convey is one of being in a crowded area where you need to carefully maneuver around the people next to you. The actual subjects of my piece will be a mixture of people that I know and the strangers I feel I know from seeing them on transit. Some of my biggest artistic inspirations for this project were Anthony Cudahy (in particular his “Burn Across the Breeze” series) and Salman Toor, both of whom I admire for their liberal use of color to convey vibrant emotion, as well as very organic uses of the brush, with a lot of texture from unblended strokes.