Friction portraiture is the method I developed to enact counter-legibility through both making and viewing. It is not only about materials. It is about designing visual resistance inside the portrait so the work cannot be consumed smoothly, quickly, or at a safe distance.

On the surface, friction is literal. The drawing retains the stops and starts of construction: abrasion of pigment against paper, erasure and re-marking, pressure, repetition, and visible edits. Instead of correcting these traces into a seamless finish, I keep them present as a record of labour, duration, and refusal. The body is built through interruption. The surface holds seams.

But friction also operates structurally. These works compress the viewing field. They deny the comfort of compositional retreat. In At the Table, there is no stable background in the conventional sense, only foreground and middle ground. Space is flattened and administrative. Lighting is restrained and bureaucratic rather than dramatic. Typography presses tightly against the body, so reading competes with seeing and the portrait resists passive looking.

This produces an optical demand: to register the work, the viewer must move closer. Hyperreal detail functions as both lure and constraint. The closer the viewer comes to see “how it was made,” the less they can avoid the subject as a person. The portrait narrows the viewer’s options. Either leave, or enter proximity.

That choice is part of the work. Friction portraiture is not a claim that all viewers will comply. Refusal, discomfort, and avoidance are structurally available responses. The point is that the portrait does not offer effortless admiration without encounter. It makes attention physical. It turns looking into a situation.

Friction portraiture keeps the making visible and the viewing unsettled because identities shaped under institutional pressure rarely arrive in the world without seams. Counter-legibility names how systems demand simplified, compliant recognition. Friction portraiture makes that pressure tangible on the surface and in the act of looking, where the portrait becomes a site of contact, resistance, and accountability.