Recovering Recognition
How to know when you are done
What do people mean when they say a portrait captures someone’s essence?
What makes a drawing feel true—not technically correct, not fully rendered, just true?
Tonight I got lost in the details working on my second hyper-real piece. Hours in, I was shading individual pores, using a .03 to trace the peach fuzz on a woman’s cheek. I was confident in the effort, convinced that more time would bring it closer to life.
But when I stepped back, the whole thing felt too tight, or maybe forced.
I’d become fixated on features and lost sight of the relationships between them—the subtle proportions and value shifts that actually make someone unmistakably themselves.
This reminds me of being in the drama of active addiction, tunneling in on a single problem and missing the bigger picture, offending others and upsetting the relationships I needed to survive.
When my relationships are right, something shifts. Its the same in a drawing. It starts to feel alive. You don’t need every detail. In fact, too much detail can blur the feeling.
It can happen in writing, too. I can force a draft into clarity, make it logical and complete—but it goes flat. There’s nothing in it I want to return to.
There’s a kind of trust required in both—to leave some areas soft, rough, or implied.
For me, that doesn’t come naturally. The impulse to finish everything, to control every surface, feels familiar. It’s not that different from the inner pressure of addiction—where more always feels like the answer.
So learning to step back, to accept a piece as complete without exhausting it, feels like part of recovery too.
That’s what I like about thinking of these pieces as Marks of Transformation.
Not just a likeness, but a drawing that holds a specific moment clearly enough that someone can recognize themselves in it.
Here are a couple recent pieces:
I’m starting to open a small number of commissions for this kind of work.
Most of them end up being:
– milestone portraits (anniversaries, etc.)
– before/after pieces
– or images that mark a specific moment in someone’s life
I’ll probably keep it to 2 at a time so I can stay close to the work.
If you have any moments you want to make more permanent, shoot me a message.
Also, I’ve been working on new graphic art posts related to Active Imagination, The Archetypes of Addiction, Art, and Recovery, a short story, and several essays. So if you’ve subscribed specifically for the Jungian ish, stay tuned for more. Thanks as always! - D