About

I am trained as a mathematician (PhD), pulled toward structure perhaps, anatomy, proportion, the geometry underneath a face as it’s a likeness. Also curious about neuroscience — how the brain actually reads a face, and why a handful of lines in the right place can carry more than a fully rendered one.

Alongside figure drawing: shodo, Western calligraphy, pen and ink, same question — technique of my hands, and what my hands can help a mark carry, how little it needs.

My tracings are those of artists I love studying — de László, Sargent, Botticelli, Leonardo among them — building toward line that is simple, structural, and about form in dimensions, volumes’, surfaces’ likenesses, lines.

In my posts I usually trace and comment, as you can see in the process videos, which I transcribe and edit. The first half of each post is an attempt to express my voice and thoughts as originally as possible. Next I rely on an LLM to suggest questions (which I answer if I find interesting), smooth grammar and spelling, and research the artist, piece, auctions, and licenses to form the second half. I try to attribute original authors and museums as much as possible and I’m glad to learn and update information about that. As these boundaries of credit and knowledge are shifting and unclear to me, for now this LLM research appears educational to me, and so I post the second half in which I use LLMs fundamentally.