Pregnant Woman - Reclining

Drawing the pregnant body in charcoal is very immediate and fun! Without color to distract from the figure, everything comes down to line, shape, light, and shadow. The body becomes the subject and the charcoal allows me to really look at it.

I am drawn to the quiet physicality of pregnancy: the weight of the body, the curve of the belly, the way posture changes, and the sense that the entire figure is adapting to something happening just beneath the surface.

There is strength in this pose, but I wasn't interested in making pregnancy look perfect or overly romantic. Pregnancy is beautiful, certainly, but it is also physical, awkward, enormous, uncomfortable, and completely fascinating. The charcoal lets some of that complexity remain in the drawing.

I love the immediacy of charcoal. The marks are direct and unforgiving. You can soften them, smudge them, build them up, but you can't completely hide the evidence of the hand that made them. That quality felt right for this subject.

This drawing is part of my exploration of pregnancy and the changing body, using a much simpler vocabulary than I use in my oil paintings.

Just line, shadow, and the remarkable fact of a body making room for another body.