Ross Ford
Ross Ford is into faces. He started drawing them in eighth grade and at 30, is still at it. As a teen, Ford drew comic book-style characters but realized the only thing that set the cartoonish, musclebound guys and beautiful girls apart from one another was their faces. So that's what he doodled in notebooks at school, a habit he describes as "nervous behavior."
"I just started doing the faces over and over again and I have literally sketch books filled with thousands and thousands of them," he says. "Just row after row after row after row of faces and each on their own is interesting. But they're way more interesting when you look at the entire group and see the progression of the faces over the course of an evening or over the course of a month, and how each one is different and also the same. It's something I had to do and then examine afterward in order to understand it.
"In one way, the people in the paintings are me," he continues. "In another way, they're emotions that have impacted me … a feeling captured in the simplest form that I can put it."
