Artist Carlos Fentanes reflects on the discipline and quiet rituals behind his early morning drawing practice—an intimate meditation on habit, presence, and the enduring power of paying attention.
The Weight of a Quiet Morning
By Carlos Fentanes
www.instagram.com/carlosfentanes
A few years ago, a friend arrived at my studio just before sunrise—confused to find the lights already on. I was there, of course, pencil in hand, drawing in silence. “You start this early?” he asked. I nodded, not because I wanted to impress him, but because there was no other time.
By 9 a.m., I’m at my day job. Like most people, I live inside a schedule. Meetings, errands, responsibilities. So the hours before the rest of the world wakes up—that’s when I work. Not out of inspiration, but necessity.
And maybe that’s where it begins: not with some romantic notion of the tortured artist, but with habit. Repetition. Discipline. I wake up, I shower, I eat a quiet breakfast. And then I draw.
Not for others. Not to make a statement. My drawings are not performances. They’re meditations. Some people close their eyes and try to empty their minds. I pick up a pencil and begin a line. Then another. Then another.
There’s something deeply familiar in that motion. My hand knows what to do before my brain catches up. I think this is what people mean when they talk about the flow state—that rare moment where you forget time, forget the self, and become fully present. For me, drawing is how I get there. And the image left behind? That’s just the residue. The evidence that I was present, once.
The paradox is that while the process feels loose and meditative, the practice itself is anything but casual. I plan every piece in advance. There’s no room for improvisation. Some drawings take a year to finish—not because they’re large, but because each mark has to earn its place. I work slowly. Deliberately. With the kind of attention a watchmaker gives to a gear, or a violinist gives to tuning a string. Whether the result is perfect isn’t the point. The aim is care.
And that care shows up in the images, too. They feel like frozen frames—scenes paused mid-thought. You can look at them, but you can’t quite enter them. They hold their breath. They wait.
The subject matter is often intimate. Uncomfortably so, at times. A posture, a silence, a room charged by memory. These aren’t grand stories. They’re footnotes from my own life. Journal entries in graphite. Viewers sometimes say the drawings make them feel like intruders. And I understand that. These were never meant for the wall. They were meant for myself.
But something strange happens when you work that honestly. People find themselves in it. Somehow, the more personal a drawing becomes, the more it resonates. Not because it explains something, but because it reveals a mood. A moment. A tension.
In the end, I think of my practice as a form of endurance. A quiet persistence. It’s not glamorous. It’s not fast. But it’s faithful. I keep drawing, not because I have something to say, but because it’s the only way I know to listen.
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