I just ride

This drawing was first imagined as part of my Dis/Armed exhibition at the Triton Museum in the fall of 2023—one of three high-key works that would be shown alongside Wishbone Study and I Am Milk. I had begun with my usual careful preparations: taping off the borders to preserve the paper’s white, working slowly within a cloud of charcoal. But cancer interrupted. My diagnosis arrived before I could truly begin.

 

Now, nearly two years later, I find myself returning—not just to this piece, but to making itself. Sometimes drawings have their own sense of time. This one waited. And in that waiting, it transformed. What was once meant for an exhibition became something more personal: a quiet act of re-entry.

 

I Just Ride is about loneliness and solitude, but also about deep friendship—the kind that endures even when words fall away. It’s about trust, and grief, and the tether that can exist between two beings in stillness.

 

The horse’s name is Duke. He is magnificent, almost as magnificent as his (now former) rider, who is the soul of this piece.

 

I’m glad I can finally share it.