This pencil sketch is the first concrete concept for a new direction I’m exploring. The series centers on the quiet, ancient presence that occupies our fields and prairies, using a recurring horned entity as a narrative anchor. I’ve been drawing inspiration from the looming, watchful nature of old-world land spirits like the Leshen, mixing that folklore with the indifferent vastness of our own open plains.
With this specific piece, titled Sedge Walking, I wanted to play with a very quiet, localized scale of cosmic ambiguity. On first glance, you see the entity cresting the far ridge line, surveying the landscape. But if you look closer at the foreground, tangled and collapsed beneath the rough blades of the sedge, there is a second figure.
By pulling that detail into the frame, the entire relationship shifts. It moves the work into a space of forlorn loss and raises questions I have no intention of answering cleanly. Is this ancient presence an active participant in this person’s quiet end, or is it merely a cosmic custodian performing the final, silent funeral rites for what the earth reclaims? Is it a protector, or an accountant taking a cold inventory of the decay?
Technically, keeping this in pure pencil on cold press paper allowed me to focus entirely on the texture and the weight of the environment. The fine, dense linework builds the chaotic grain of the grass, burying the foreground figure in a way that forces the viewer to slow down and actually look for the story. Future pieces will continue to track this entity—or the trailing remnants of its presence—through various field settings, establishing a running dialogue between the observer and the soil.
