Portraits — pencil drawing by Ray Patrick
Three graphite head studies on one sheet, all tipped back and lit from above, with a pen and a brush lying across the paper and a small landscape panel clipped to a board behind.
The heads run down the sheet in a column, each in its own rectangle of worked tone, and the sheet is set at an angle to the frame. The middle study is the most finished and the largest; the one below it is barely begun.
Graphite on white, from a soft black in the grounds to bare paper on the brow and the bridge of the nose. The only colour in the photograph is the landscape panel behind — cobalt, emerald and umber.
The grounds are rubbed flat and the heads cut out of them by leaving the paper, with the darks of the eye and nostril put in last with a sharp point. The construction lines are never erased.
Graphite on paper, three studies, dated in pencil. A studio photograph of a sheet of drawings rather than a single picture.
No signature legible at this scale.