Drawing as
listening

As a child, drawing was a form of play I could disappear into for hours. Growing up in Germany, I was steeped in a tradition of precision and reverence for the visible world. Dürer and Escher were not distant figures but part of the artistic inheritance that shaped how I learned to see. Their mastery was something I aspired to before I had words for any of it, a pursuit that still shapes my hand today.

I work in colored pencil and graphite because they let me enter the work directly, into a quality of slowness the rest of life rarely offers. The subject does not give itself away all at once. Looking becomes an intimate conversation with the subject. Craftsmanship, for me, is a practice of listening—for what wants to happen, rather than what I’ve already decided should. The technical skill is already there; the art now lives in getting out of its way. It takes a particular kind of trust: to release control without releasing discipline.

Contemplative practice has guided my choices throughout my life, long before I understood it as such. My years as a Montessori teacher were not a departure from drawing but an expression of the same discipline—the same careful observation, the same trust in what emerges in its own time. Returning to this work has felt less like a new direction than a continuation of what was always there.

I draw everyday objects and familiar landscapes — a weathered dough cabinet, tulips opening into bloom, a windswept hillside at dusk. What captivates me is the play of light against dark and the way it can ask a viewer to lean in and stay a little longer than they planned.

What continues to surprise me is when a stillness, usually unnoticed, becomes visible in a drawing. I never know when it will happen. I only know that it is more likely to emerge when I surrender my desire to direct the outcome and something unplanned arrives on the page instead.