Benjamin
Franklin

Currency reimagined. Power examined.

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.