In the Studio, May 2025. Photograph by Allyce Castillo ©2025.
For more than four decades, my work has been shaped by the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly the art of Edward Burne-Jones and the broader Symbolist and fin de siècle traditions. The essay below, published in the Summer 2025 issue of The PRS Review as the inaugural entry in the series In an Artist’s Studio, outlines the development of that influence across my artistic life.
In it, I trace the trajectory from my early encounters with the movement to my contemporary practice as a draughtsman working consciously within — and extending — this tradition. I offer it here as a concise record of the evolution that brought me to my present aesthetic and the principles that continue to guide my work.
In 1982, when I was sixteen, I was an aspiring young artist living in California’s flat, sun-baked, agriculturally dense Central Valley, the most unlikely place to fall in love with the Pre-Raphaelites. It was there that I discovered the illustration monograph, The Studio that chronicled the formation of the famed New York City collective made up of fantasists Jeffery Catherine Jones, Michael William Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson, which led to my profound interest in The Pre-Raphaelites. In his chapter, artist Barry Windsor-Smith spoke of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, citing Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, JW Waterhouse, and Frederick Leighton as key influences on his work. Windsor-Smith’s Pre-Raphaelite-inspired style was new to me; it proved to be a sign in the road that galvanized me to seek out and learn more about the names he mentioned.
Soon after, I discovered Christopher Wood’s seminal book The Pre-Raphaelites. That oversized tome continued the evolution that began with The Studio. At a glance, the image on its cover, Burne-Jones’s The Mirror of Venus, conveyed what was artistically possible and a direction; it also led me further down the path of fine art inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Over the ensuing years, I continued to improve my work, graduated from art school, and began working professionally. During that time, I, like many artists, spent energy attempting to find “my style.” As always, the Pre-Raphaelites remained in the background, gently haunting me. Even though I yearned to embrace their aesthetic, I held myself back because I knew my work needed to be world-class to be worthy of their legacy.
In 2000, I had the opportunity to travel to the UK to show menu designs to a friend who had plans to open a café bookstore in Central London. During my stay, I had the opportunity to visit Tate Britain and see the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. The impact was profound. Standing in front of Millais’s Ophelia, Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott, and Burne-Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid was nothing short of a religious experience that deepened my longing to commit to the aesthetic I had loved for so long.
In the years following, personal hurdles began to pile up—life circumstances, grief, and a myriad of other distractions. Due to this, I drifted from my work and considered giving up on the artistic vision I had nourished since adolescence. Still, I kept drawing, even though the work felt directionless. My skill had diminished, and my standards had slipped, but fierce resolve and perseverance kept me going. I knew things had to change, and after some genuine soul-searching, I found the answer I sought. To feel fulfilled, I had to return to where it all started: the Pre-Raphaelites, not as a nostalgic echo but as the foundation of my work. I began rebuilding, refining my skill, raising my standards, and constructing a personal ideology that would allow me to carry the Pre-Raphaelite tradition into the present while making it my own.
Everything finally culminated in the summer of 2022 when I read Andrea Wolk Rager’s The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones. Her brilliant reinterpretation of Burne-Jones’s oeuvre was the blueprint I had been seeking. Her scholarship illuminated Burne-Jones’s subtle but radical condemnations of environmental destruction, economic inequality, and empire. Her book gave me the intellectual and creative permission I had been waiting for. It proved that the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic could be a vehicle for contemporary relevance, not just homage. The style I have embraced continues to evolve as I slowly incorporate the ideas and themes I’ve mentioned. My drawings, Mystery, and my portrait of Fanny Eaton, pictured in this article, reflect the two sides of the style I have embraced. In Mystery, you see the ethereal and dreamlike nature so prominent in the work of the PRB, and in my portrait of Fanny Eaton, you see diversity and a global point of view.
Burne-Jones has always felt like a kindred spirit. Like me, he was an only child born to humble beginnings and shaped by the presence of a single parent. He drew to survive, to understand, to transcend. Although his sense of design and draughtsmanship have been lifelong inspirations, his painted work has spoken even more profoundly to me. Works such as The Mirror of Venus and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid resonated most with me⏤his ability to use beauty and allegory to condemn the status quo and imagination and visual lyricism to sweep you away to what he called “a land no one can define or remember, only desire.” Burne-Jones has taught me that beauty has the power to be both ornament and epiphany. That runs through everything I create now.
This belief also informs my process. My new work always begins with an idea from something I’ve dreamed, imagined, read, listened to, or watched. Creating a new drawing starts in the pages of my sketchbook as a series of thumbnails that are transferred and developed on tracing paper, where I work through multiple layers until my composition feels right. Once I feel confident with my preliminary drawing, I transfer it to a sheet of 4-ply Bristol board. At this stage, I examine every detail with extreme precision. If something doesn’t feel right, I create separate studies or technique roughs until I resolve the issue.
Then begins the slow, tedious process of drawing my design in ink, using mostly Rapidograph technical pens, building linework with patience and precision. Light, shadow, and value gradually develop through dense crosshatching and layered textures. Depending on the complexity, a single drawing can take over 40 hours. Once finished, minor flaws get corrected with white gouache. My process is slow by design, reflecting the same belief held by the Pre-Raphaelites: that care and intention matter in making an image.
Through my work, I aim to extend the visual language of the Pre-Raphaelites into the present. I draw from the PRB and the designers and artists of the fin de siècle and filter their legacy through a contemporary lens focused on creating work with genuine intent and a higher purpose beyond commodification that celebrates global culture and spotlights social concerns. The prescience, deeper meaning, and radical nature of Burne-Jones’s work revealed in Dr. Rager’s book have provided me with a framework to follow that allows me to express my own global point of view and concerns regarding environmental destruction, income inequality, and social injustice.
The Pre-Raphaelites presented me with an artistic vision that changed everything. The bar they set in my formative years has been a constant in my life, and Edward Burne-Jones’s work has continued to be a guiding light on the artistic road I am traveling. My work has undergone many changes since discovering the PRB; through years of trial and error, I have achieved a level of mastery in my draughtsmanship that has allowed me to confidently embrace an aesthetic inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and the designers and artists of the fin de siècle. The merging of a PRB aesthetic and an ideology that reflects my worldview has finally allowed me to become the artist I envisioned when, at sixteen, I first encountered The Studio—and then, not long after, opened The Pre-Raphaelites by Christopher Wood and saw, perhaps for the first time, who I truly was.
Originally published in The PRS Review (Summer 2025) as part of In an Artist’s Studio, edited by Dr. Zaynub Zaman. Reproduced with gratitude to the Pre-Raphaelite Society.
For copies of the PRS Review and membership details, visit the Pre-Raphaelite Society
