Invented Worlds
My images do not emerge from observation alone—they are built. Each one begins as an invented world, constructed from a foundation of internal logic, bodily understanding, and imagined light. Like the Renaissance artists I admire, I begin not with what is seen, but with what is known, felt, and reasoned. Light does not simply fall across a form—I decide where it originates, and every shadow and highlight is shaped in service to that decision. The resulting modelling has its own integrity, its own necessity. It either works or it doesn't—just like a physical structure.
In this process, I often construct forms based on what I think of as a “unit of 1”—a visual constant that guides proportion and spatial coherence. This is not literal measurement, but a way of keeping everything tethered to a believable scale and point of view. We see the world with two eyes; forms bend and turn in space; lines arc toward and away from us. I believe this is what the Renaissance masters understood intuitively: that the realism in their paintings wasn’t a product of supernatural skill or unattainable perfection, but of intentional invention. Their worlds were imagined with the same coherence and integrity that we now find in 3D modeling. They weren’t copying—they were building.
Somewhere along the way, this understanding was lost. The modern emphasis on drawing and painting from observation has become a kind of externalized process—outside in, rather than inside out. But I believe we can reclaim this earlier method. Not through nostalgia, but through synthesis: by fusing our contemporary tools and technologies with the structural intelligence and clarity of the past. My work is an attempt to make inroads into this lost territory. Not because we’ve lost the ability to render, but because we’ve forgotten how to invent. And invention—world-building—is where the true poetry of image-making lies.