Welcome

Making color pencil drawings replaced painting for me fifteen years ago, but the processes are similar in that each drawing requires its own painterly invention to describe surfaces and to create effective illusions. My interests sometimes wander as I am lured away by the pleasures of irony: combining pop culture icons with facsimiles of traditional works of art, the prosaic and the precious. But I always return to making portraits of ordinary things,  mostly utilitarian objects that come my way. They seem to find me. Some are even the vestiges of my former work as a painter. I meticulously record the beauty of their wear as my way of honoring their often unknowable histories. The drawings combine my knack for realism with my minimalist sensibilities.

Philip Carpenter