Nicole is one of my earliest marker drawings.  I initially chose to do it because I thought it would be an interesting exercise in shading.  I remembered the rounded cheeks and extreme lighting in this photo I had taken of Nicole Halpin at Reed College in 1980.  Would the markers work on this? Apparently yes.  

Generally the figures in my work are present as simply generic individuals. I had usually shied away from out and out portraiture.  This represents a real departure.  Yes, the shading was a useful exercise; but maybe Nicole's untimely death in 2011 from a brain tumor had made me reconsider focusing more on the person herself rather than on her more generic self.  

Nicole had been a poet, so I had chosen to make my initial 2011 elegy a poem -  her medium.  3 years later I finally completed the process with this - the medium of my choice.