2020 06 14

I drew this portrait with graphite on paper. A picture she sent me in 2015 was the basis for the piece. The fuzziness of the image, which is low resolution, appealed to me.
 
Modern digital cameras can be seen as direct descendants of the camera obscura. Renaissance painters were very interested in this optical device. “Da Vinci was clearly very interested in the camera obscura: over the years he drew circa 270 diagrams of the camera obscura in his notebooks”, Wikipedia. Many painters have used the camera obscura to make very accurate tracings which were used for paintings. The camera obscura tracing would be gridded and an often larger similar grid would be applied to the surface to be painted. A highly accurate outline is transferred with this method. It has be theorized that many artists have used the camera obscura to increase the accuracy of their drawings and paintings, including Leonardo, Vermeer Caravaggio, etc
 
In this drawing I employed the grid approach applying the grid to the digital image. This is like the camera obscura image and then made a grid on the paper to transfer the image. I made the amateur mistake of using a sharp hard pencil to scribe the grid. Unfortunately this made the lines impossible to erase since they were ‘engraved’ into the paper.