One day when I was thirteen I was drawing a vase that sat clinging to the edge of our kitchen table. My grandmother walked in and saw me furiously erasing the marks on my sheet of paper. Just then, she leaned over, took the eraser out of my hand, and said, “There is no such thing as a mistake in drawing.”

A mistake in drawing could be characterized as the mark of a gesture that was in error and should be removed from the page. However, I love to see the trail of movements that the artist takes through the process of making a drawing. This self-portrait was executed with my right and left hands simultaneously. Both hands made rows of the number 2 to describe the surface of my face. Because I am right-handed, the 2’s on the right side were laid out with precision while those on my left were chaotic. The rows from each hand were kept apart by a thin, empty space running vertically through the center of the page.

This symmetry and irregularity maintain an equal role in describing my face. As I look at this drawing, I see my whole body trying to make the contour of my head. For things to be real, they must embrace all aspects of the journey it took to create them.