What differentiates a portrait from a figurative painting is the eyes. A figure becomes a portrait when it is injected with life. The main objective I strive for in creating a portrait is to depict the sense of being that is evident in a person's face. All people are somewhat obsessed with faces. Look at every billboard, every magazine page, every television screen... the most apparent images repeating over and over are faces. When we love, we love a face. If we hate, we hate a face. It is our most powerful and most primitive form of communication - one that can never be truly dissected or explained. It is my hope to describe, through the language of paint, some of the varieties and subtleties of human emotion manifested in the features of a face.