I think of my drawings as extensions of my internal self. Animal imagery is something that I often make use of. I find it easy to project emotions and certain characteristics onto them. It has to do with shyness and embarrassment. I am no longer the one being observed as having these feelings; instead, there is an animal in my place. Maybe it can be looked at more sympathetically. I am also fascinated by the human-animal relationship. Humans are literally animals, but we consciously make an effort to differentiate ourselves from them, oftentimes on the basis of intelligence or morality. My work tends to be about this deliberate distance that we (humans) place ourselves from animals, and how I feel that that distance is actually quite small.
I rarely use color; I usually work in graphite or metalpoint. My process of drawing is pretty tedious. That's the way I like it to be. I use a really soft graphite pencil to shade the background behind a drawing. In this way, the drawing becomes separate from the paper that it lives on; it almost becomes an object, a drawing within a drawing. I end up spending a lot of time shading and blending and layering. I repeat this until I get something really dark and moody. I want it to look like it almost absorbs light. There are certainly easier ways to go about this—using something like charcoal, for example—but I enjoy the monotonous, hand-aching process. It is very meditative and I have always drawn this way. It is a nice reprieve to not question something, to not search for a solution or a shortcut, and to just act on my own natural inclinations—my animal instincts, even.