There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes with meeting someone who feels like an end-point. It isn’t a gentle falling; it’s a collapse of the self into the orbit of another. I remember sitting with the weight of that feeling, the way a single person can suddenly hold the power to both animate and extinguish you. It is a heavy, beautiful burden to find a person worth dying for.
When I picked up my pencil for this piece, I wanted the lines to feel as sharp and uncompromising as that realization. My hand moved with a certain urgency, tracing the architecture of the body not just as form, but as a map of desire. I find that black and white allows for a raw honesty that color sometimes masks; it strips away the distractions and leaves only the tension of the stroke and the white of the paper.
The figure emerged through a series of deliberate, dark marks—the curve of a hip, the tilt of a head, the suggestion of a gaze that demands everything. I am always drawn to the way skin holds light and shadow, and how a simple graphite line can convey the heat of a touch or the coldness of a distance. In this work, the anatomy is a language of its own, speaking of a hunger that is both provocative and quiet.
“I wanted to capture the visceral surrender that happens when someone becomes your entire horizon.”— Kaethe Butcher, Studio Notes,
The title, C'mon (She Make Me Kill Myself), isn’t about literal endings, but about the ego’s death. It’s about that reckless invitation to let someone else take the lead, even if it leads to your own undoing. I wanted to explore the eroticism of that vulnerability, the point where pleasure and the loss of control become indistinguishable.
Looking back at it now, I see the traces of my own breath in those lines. It remains a reminder of the times we choose to lose ourselves on purpose. There is a profound freedom in admitting that someone has that kind of power over you, and I think that’s what I was truly trying to pin down—the moment we stop fighting the pull and simply let go.
