A selection of works from my project “Women of Note.” It has been inspired both by women who have fascinated me and who have a place in history, and by the need I feel for these women’s likenesses to be portrayed as well as I can manage. I started this project in 2015, and have completed 150 to date. The portraits are postcard-sized, rendered on Khadi handmade paper. The colors are mostly very flat matte vinyl paint and the marks are Bic pen. I try to keep the image relatively simple and graphic. Yet, drawing a portrait, even from a photograph, is a very intimate activity. With the colors and drawing I try to feel-into what I understand or imagine of the woman's personality. The portraits also inevitably carry a flavor of my personal feelings about each subject. See more of the Women of Note (see more here), and women who are significant in the Woman-Life-Freedom movement in Iran (more here). Women have long protested the misogyny of the regime of the mullahs, and the movement was highly energized when Mahsa Amini died in state custody from brutal injuries she received soon after her arrest in 2022 for a minute infraction of the strict female code of dress in Iran.

Click to enlarge, and mouse over each portrait for more information.