Jesse Kercheval

Artist Statement

I have been a poet and writer all my life, but only began drawing four years ago when I was locked down in Montevideo, Uruguay in the first days of the pandemic. I bought a pack of colored pencils and began sketching to keep myself from doomscrolling all day. For me, art was the gift of the pandemic, something good in all the terrible. I began a practice of doing a drawing a day. My only rule was that once I started, I had to finish—no tearing the drawing up or throwing it away. I just had to learn what I could each day. Gradually I moved into combining words and art. Publishing illustrated essay (lots of words with some images) and graphic essays (art with a few words directly on the image) publishing them in literary magazines such as Image, New Letters, the Denver Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review and Fourth Genre. My graphic memoir French Girl will be published by Fieldmouse Press in August. Now, I nearly always draw with soft pastels. I drew these at my easel on 9 x12 paper this spring.