Hi there!

I’m going to try to use this space more regularly to write and think and post random things I like. So what better way to start than to show some images from a project I’ve been working on over the past four-ish months?

I like projects and focus and goals. When I didn’t get homework as a child, I would lie to my parents and tell them I had to spend the evening coping a page out of the encyclopedia. I still assign myself projects for fun, so this spring and summer, I drew the human heart once a day for 125 days.

I had a number of reasons for doing this. I like drawing, and I like anatomy. I’ve worked in cardiology research, so I had a decent understanding of cardiac structure and physiology, but I wanted to understand the heart through my attention and the movement of my hand. Some of these hearts are anatomically correct, some are decorative, some hold howling dogs and spiders, some are in the shapes of beetles. Some are simply valve structures; these were fun to draw.

Sometimes, when something scares me, I draw it over and over. That was partly the case here. I wanted to use my pens to love up my (totally benign, yet occasionally emphatic) arrhythmia. And one time, I saw a heart with a perfectly round bullet hole in the ventricle, and all I could think was “abomination, abomination, abomination.” So, these hearts are prayers and pleas and wails about what I think is worth protecting.

I hope you enjoy them. If you’d like to see individual sketches, they’re all on Instagram.

Hearts July