Rediscovering My Love for Painting People

Drawing portraits for a live event as a college student in 2014 at the Noel Fine Arts Center (NFAC) UW-Stevens Point.

I’ve recently fallen back in love with painting human portraits. When I started to take painting seriously, as a junior in high school, I thought of portraits as one of the most significant and meaningful forms of art. Maybe it's because I grew up with a pastel portrait of my mom and aunt as kids in a drawing that my grandmother has. As a college student in UW-Stevens Point’s studio art program I was in numerous life drawing classes and started to appreciate the practice of looking closely at the human form. Portraiture and capturing a likeness was always a part of those drawings for me but rarely did I sit and try to draw portraits in those classes. As I continued in the program I began to develop an interest in painting landscapes and figurative subjects. My primary professor Diane Canfield Bywaters was one of my first inspirations for painting and drawing portraits. Her passion for capturing the spirit and personality of her models inspired me to look closer. I remember once she allowed me to sit with and record part of her drawing process in the drawing studio. I still have that video published on my channel:

As a student between 2011-2015, I took up watercolor, acrylic, and eventually tried oil painting. I received a beginner set of oils for Christmas in 2012 and never looked back. I was immediately hooked with its buttery texture, open working time, and aromas. Oils have been my main medium over the last 10+ years. In hindsight, starting out with watercolor and acrylic set me up for success (along with frugal painting habits) to work in thin layers of oil paint. Most people struggle with oils when they have too much paint on the surface they’re trying to cover leading to muddy areas that are harder to control. 

While I was studying at Point I remember the overwhelming feeling of inspiration from the classes I was in, my peers in the program, books I borrowed from the campus library, artist videos I watched religiously on YouTube, and once I joined Instagram my pool of inspiring painters exploded! I started discovering and collecting painters like pokemon. Artists like Kim Cogan, John Wentz, Emilio Villalba, Jeremy Lipking, Felicia Forte, Jeremy Mann, David Gray, Casey Baugh, Robert Liberace, James Gurney, Sean Cheetham, Richard Schmid, Alvaro Castagnet, David Shevlino, Benjamin Bjorklund, Phil Hale, David Kassan, Jenny Saville, Nicolas Uribe, and many others. Their landscapes and figure paintings felt fresh and exciting and created the foundation for how I think about painting as a practice for discovery. 

I gained a ton of insight from re-watching the same YouTube videos that would show anything painting related. My favorites were trailer videos from APV Films and demos from the arts student league. I would notice how an artist used the tools to love the paint a certain way and then try it on my own paintings during class or how David Kassan would soften and layer lines in his portrait drawings and then mimic those techniques in my life drawing classes. The combination of examples seen online and the time spent in the studios allowed me to connect methods that worked for the type of art I wanted to make. 

UWSP’s program at that time was in some ways like a mini MFA program. There was a healthy balance in my opinion of guided instruction and space to explore independent ideas. Like many art students I spent most of my time at the NFAC. The drawing and painting studios became safe havens for me to sit and think about anything that needed to be processed whether or not it was related to my art. Looking back now I understand how important and significant the community and those rooms were for me.

One of my semesters during my sophomore year I remember being enrolled in a life drawing class, life painting class, and attending weekly life drawing sessions hosted by one of the student organizations. In total I was drawing or painting from live models for 15 hours a week! I wish I could relive that semester. I definitely got accustomed to the time spent carefully looking and often point to that semester as a breakthrough period where I connected so many solutions to understanding line, shape, value, form, and space. Color has taken a lot longer for me to make some sense of.

What I loved most about life drawing settings was the freedom to explore numerous mediums and styles while trying to depict the figure on a 2-dimensional surface. I would use everything from graphite, charcoal, ink, markers, colored pencils, watercolor, acrylics, pastels, and gouache. At that time art students also had the luxury of getting stacks of free 20” x 30” test drawing paper from the campus paper science labs. The paper became the basis for Strathmore’s Riverpoint Printmaking paper akin to Arches or Rives BFK. We were spoiled! I still buy and use that paper because I learned so much on its unique texture and weight. 

In those classes I wanted to understand things like proportions, scale, volume, light, and likeness but eventually became interested in how the figure could become a vehicle for meaning in my work and began to think more universally on themes related to the body in space, repetition, scale, time, completeness, and more. I remember Diane encouraging me to paint from my life drawings as source material which felt really healthy for my process at the time.

I made a ton of drawings and paintings from observation of the model where I gained most of my chops and early confidence in the process. Now I think most of them were not very good. Part of me wishes I could go back in time and slow down to prioritize quality over quantity, but then I would be a different artist than I am today. I think I needed those early years to experiment and take risks. Not only because it gave me multiple opportunities to fail and learn but because it formed the basis of my philosophy on making art.

It was hard to transition from my time at UWSP where I was surrounded by creativity and resources like life drawing sessions and stacks of paper. I’ve struggled to maintain that kind of observational practice with the figure since. As a grad student between 2017-2020 I attended a few on campus life drawing sessions my first year while I was also teaching a foundations drawing course. We hired student models for the drawing class so I was around that process but it wasn’t as consistent as my student days in Stevens Point. My second and third years in the MFA program became more focused on research and studio work. Now it’s been 6 years since I graduated with my MFA and life has taken me on a path filled with new friends, studio painting, plein air painting, teaching, and other exciting experiences. Up until recently there was still very little life drawing or figure painting. It may seem weird or silly but there’s something very grounding about drawing a person from direct observation in the same room. 

Maybe it’s the shared time and space spent together. Or maybe it’s that I feel closer to understanding myself the longer I look at someone else. Either way I long for the comfort I used to feel as a college student in those drawing classes where it felt as if time stood still and I was exactly where I needed to be.

Today I live in Grafton, WI which is an hour north of where I grew up and two hours southeast of Stevens Point. My wife Megan and I have lived in this area now for five years. We hardly knew anyone here when we moved, and we’re slowly finding our sense of place but it has yet to feel like Point did. Maybe that has more to do with how much I’ve changed versus being in a different place. Growing up from 18  - 21 years old was an exciting time that I’ll always cherish. 

Last August in 2025 I started attending monthly portrait painting sessions hosted by a local artist Erin Callahan Blum at the Cedarburg Art Museum. It's been a wonderful new routine conveniently located with a small consistent group of artists. The sessions last 3 hours from 1-4pm on a Tuesday each month. So far it’s been really great and I can feel the difference the sessions are making in my own creative psyche. Even though I’ve been fortunate to spend most of my time painting and drawing, the time spent closely observing another person’s face has been wonderful. I’m grateful to share these sessions with new and old friends and look forward to keeping up with them in the coming months. Maybe there are some other sessions nearby that I’ll get to attend soon too! 

It’s fun to reminisce on the journey that’s brought me to this point and the different people who have helped inspire my art over the years. I hope this post was as fun to read as it was to write. Thank you for reading and supporting my art!