Emily Grenader / Stranger Drawing Show

Portraiture is a strange form. It is about making a piece of art that represents a person.

For this project, drawings were done from photographs people sent in, then studied by the artist for a drawn portrait, and then compared to a real person at the show's opening, where I photographed the person with the drawing.

Stranger Drawings is about drawing strangers or being drawn by a stranger, and collecting the pictures.

This website is a collection of the images from the show on December 12th. Fifty-seven strangers emailed photographs of themselves to me, and thirty-five arrived at the opening to receive his or her drawing.

There is something a photograph catches about a person that drawing can never catch, and there is something about the act of drawing a person that allows you to make a connection without even knowing a person. And, of course, nothing lets you know the nature of a person more than by interacting with that person yourself. Suddenly, when all three meet, something special happens.