Charcoal & Graphite Portrait
In God
Benjamin Franklin — statesman, inventor, founding father — rendered in charcoal and graphite in the exact format of his portrait on the hundred-dollar bill. The circular vignette, the formal collar, the Franklin banner: all the iconography of currency, freed from its transactional context and placed on cotton paper.
The question the work asks is simple: what changes when you remove money from the equation? The face remains. The authority remains. But the context shifts entirely — from something spent to something kept, from something handled to something considered.
Drawn in charcoal and graphite on 300gsm archival cotton paper. The circular composition is built through controlled layering — dense charcoal at the edges of the vignette, delicate graphite work at the centre where the face demands the most precision.
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