PORTRAIT — ‘Cody.’

Within my scope of work, it isn’t often I do portraits of ‘real’ people. I find them wholly off-putting, similarly to when people commission me to draw beloved family pets. There’s too much that can go wrong, too many small details that can mess up the entire image. Cody and I existed in an online space together for a while before we really ‘spoke’, and he was first drawn to my artwork. I made it a daily habit of sketching people’s avatars and posting them for free, both to interact with and meet new people, but also for practice for myself. He found this to be incredibly meaningful at a dark point in his life, and since meeting him and growing to know him, he interfaces with my artwork in ways I’ve never had people do before. He sees creating artwork as the ultimate purpose of human life on this planet, and so do I. The process, learning time and time again from mistakes to make something you’re proud of is something that can never be taken away by generative AI.

I took great pleasure in drawing characters he had created (Cole Fasthorse-Stuggy and Callum Prescott) so it seemed only fitting I created a piece of him. The small background, pictured below, is the first abstract piece I had created in many years. When I was purely a traditional artist, I found a lot of catharsis through creating large abstract pieces. The piece I made was titled ‘Sorrow’, as a reflection of the moments of difficulty we have both experience throughout our lives.

Cody has segmented heterochromia, giving his eyes a very unusual but beautiful quality which I made sure to include within this piece. I made sure to keep the shading and colours around his eyes muted so not to draw attention away from that. His features are ideally proportionate to how I was “taught” to draw, meaning it was easy to translate his face into my style comfortably. At my time of creating this piece, around the beginning of 2024, those with feminine features were still the predominant subject of my work. For a long time I found beards and more masculine features difficult and so I made every attempt to avoid them. Balancing his features here, including the beard and not making his face look too long was rather complicated at the time but now almost a year on I am still incredibly proud of this piece.

Atticus said, “give me a muse and I will paint for you a world so bright you must close your eyes to see it,” and that rhetoric is wholly true. To create art is to articulate self-expression when words are inadequate, but to create art with others, for others, is an incredibly fulfilling experience. It is a reminder of why humans are such social creatures, of why we were put on this Earth.