In art school, you draw from life constantly.

Still lifes. Botanical compositions. And figure drawing, a live model in the room, a timer counting down, your hand moving as fast as your eye. No overthinking. Just looking and mark-making, over and over, until you start to actually see.

These drawings were not meant to be precious. They are practice. They teach your hand to respond before your brain can second-guess it. You do dozens in a single session and most of them go in the recycling bin at the end of the semester. That's the point.

I kept mine.

Not all of them. But enough. Flat-filed with the etching proofs, the composition sketches, the studies and the failures and the things that were almost something. More than two decades in a portfolio that moved with me from home to home without ever being opened.

I'm not sure why I kept them. At the time it felt like sentiment, or stubbornness, or just not wanting to throw away something that had taken effort even if no one would ever frame it.

Looking at them now I can see what I was learning. How to find the weight of a body in a few quick lines. How to understand light and shadow not as things that exist on a surface but as things that reveal form. How to look at a plant and see not just leaves but the logic of how they grow, the direction they reach, the way one overlaps another.

Those lessons are in my work now, as a way of seeing that became part of how I move through the world.

I used to feel a little embarrassed about keeping things like this. Like it was evidence of an inability to let go.

Now I think it was just knowing, somewhere underneath the practical voice that says throw it away, that nothing made with that much attention is really disposable.

It was all waiting.

Weave of Life is a large-scale modular installation growing panel by panel, story by story. To follow the project, subscribe below. To inquire about the work, reach out at nancy@nancyfritzart.com​