FATHERS

Posted on January 14, 2012

Identities as father and son are from before time.

God the Son has always been in loving relationship with God the Father. Our earthly relationships are echoes, or pointers, to this reality. I’m grateful to have come from such an earthy, loving, and wise line of men. I admire so much about my father and my father’s father.

I hope to become the kind of father that, though fallen and undergoing restoration, will be a pointer for my children back to their true Father.

For this drawing, I worked more a bit more quickly than usual using a graphite stick on drawing paper. I like how the speed and thickness of the graphite describes the faces in generalities. From a murky chunk of lines, the eye pulls out the lines that read most accurately, or most simply. The softness of the graphite against the paper is such a pleasing sensation. It is freeing, each thick pass across the page gives you the freedom and ambiguity to create without worrying about precision. In that way it is very forgiving.

I also enjoy the tension of trying to make a pleasing drawing. If you care too much and try too hard, it looks all fussy, self-important, and a bit pathetic. If you don’t care enough it looks like wasted effort, amateurish, insincere. I try to work it like I work other important things in life, give it my best, but don’t pour your identity into it. Hold it with an open hand.