October 5,2025
Dear Song,
how's it going?
I returned to Italy for a couple of weeks and I started visiting some of the pavilions at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
My work continues frantically and fascinatingly.
Alongside drawing, I've also started writing short stories, similar to those I did for the 100 Challenge.
It's a regenerating experience and a great source of artistic growth. I owe this boost to our collaboration.
The correspondence we've had this year and the planning of our future exhibitions have given me, and continue to give me, a strong motivational boost, along with a huge amount of energy.
I'm happy to have completed the first part of my academic journey in England with honors and I am quite proud of the thesis I handed in in mid-September.
The correspondence we've had this year and the planning of our future exhibitions have given me, and continue to give me, a strong motivational boost, along with a huge amount of energy.
I'm happy to have completed the first part of my academic journey in England with honors and I am quite proud of the thesis I handed in in mid-September.
In the last few months, I've published a couple of drawings in feminist journals, both American and English, and I'm now working on publishing some of my academic articles.
It's been a year of profound transformation for me.
It's been a year of profound transformation for me.
I feel open to change and confident about the future.
The projects I'm working on, which I mentioned in my previous email, are the result of this change.
The series of marker drawings titled "Playfulness," for example, begins with the recovery of the pleasure of the creative act but then delves into the concept of playfulness, exploring its personal and political implications.
I'll share a fragment from an academic text by Maria Lugones that served as the starting point for my reflection:
“Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a com-
bination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important,
not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges
a source of wisdom and delight.
So, positively, the playful attitude involves openness to surprise,
openness to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruc-
tion and to construction or reconstruction of the "worlds" we inhabit
playfully. Negatively, playfulness is characterized by uncertainty, lack
of self-importance, absence of rules or a not taking rules as sacred,
a not worrying about competence and a lack of abandonment to a par-
ticular construction of oneself, others and one's relation to them.”
Instead, the other series of works I'm working on began with a revival of classical drawing techniques; it stemmed from the desire to draw from life, copying real subjects, using traditional materials (white chalk, charcoal, gray paper). From this manual practice of copying from life and portraiture—which I had long dismissed as uncreative and manneristic—was born the desire to tell a story through people’s face and to rediscover the documentary value of portraiture.
This gave rise to a series of works that I've temporarily called "auto-ethnography": a collection of faces of people who have marked my personal and professional growth and who have inspired me over the years. Drawing on auto-ethnography, an academic methodology that uses personal experience to explore epistemological knowledge, I sought my own features, my own history, in the faces of these characters. I did so with a charcoal, rewriting my own profile in theirs and creating a geography of emotions that overlaps different levels within the drawing, ending up changing the final portrait into a new face.
The series of marker drawings titled "Playfulness," for example, begins with the recovery of the pleasure of the creative act but then delves into the concept of playfulness, exploring its personal and political implications.
I'll share a fragment from an academic text by Maria Lugones that served as the starting point for my reflection:
“Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a com-
bination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important,
not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges
a source of wisdom and delight.
So, positively, the playful attitude involves openness to surprise,
openness to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruc-
tion and to construction or reconstruction of the "worlds" we inhabit
playfully. Negatively, playfulness is characterized by uncertainty, lack
of self-importance, absence of rules or a not taking rules as sacred,
a not worrying about competence and a lack of abandonment to a par-
ticular construction of oneself, others and one's relation to them.”
Instead, the other series of works I'm working on began with a revival of classical drawing techniques; it stemmed from the desire to draw from life, copying real subjects, using traditional materials (white chalk, charcoal, gray paper). From this manual practice of copying from life and portraiture—which I had long dismissed as uncreative and manneristic—was born the desire to tell a story through people’s face and to rediscover the documentary value of portraiture.
This gave rise to a series of works that I've temporarily called "auto-ethnography": a collection of faces of people who have marked my personal and professional growth and who have inspired me over the years. Drawing on auto-ethnography, an academic methodology that uses personal experience to explore epistemological knowledge, I sought my own features, my own history, in the faces of these characters. I did so with a charcoal, rewriting my own profile in theirs and creating a geography of emotions that overlaps different levels within the drawing, ending up changing the final portrait into a new face.
Now I'm preparing to leave the carefree sunshine of Italy and return to the brooding gray of England.
Let me know about you,
hugs
Let me know about you,
hugs
Rob