Ray DiCapua, a professor of drawing and sculpture at the University of Connecticut, has created a series of large-scale charcoal drawings of people close to him. This drawing depicts his mother, Phyllis, and captures not only her likeness but a sense of narrative and emotion. DiCapua pulled back from making art in the early 1990s to focus on contemplative traditions and practice. About ten years later he returned to drawing, studying how identity is constructed. As he has explained, “the senses receive raw data. I am curious about how that raw data gets connected in the ways that it does and how it then turns into story, history, belief patterns, [and] the experience of self.”