Ed Fairburn draws portraits on maps. Roads become lines of shading, clusters of streets deepen a shadow and a coastline traces the edge of a cheek. Step close and the map is still perfectly legible; step back and a face gathers itself out of the same marks.

Portrait drawn onto a printed map by Ed Fairburn

The series has made Fairburn one of the best-known artists working with cartography, and the pieces collected here show how varied his source material can be, from city street plans to a First World War trench map.

Who is Ed Fairburn?

Ed Fairburn is an artist and illustrator who draws portraits and other images over old paper maps. His website, edfairburn.com, shows commissions such as a portrait over a map of Paris and a crosshatched drawing on an atlas map of Richmond, London, as well as newer map-based works. In 2015 his map portraits were exhibited in Denver, and his website records his work in “Contemporary Figuration”, a fifteen-artist group show at the city’s Abend Gallery.

Ed Fairburn’s portrait drawn into the lines of an existing map
Ed Fairburn’s portrait drawn into the lines of an existing map. Gallery attribution: Ed Fairburn.

How the map portraits are made

Fairburn works in ink directly on the map, using a fountain pen and pigment liners and building tone through crosshatching – “Not pencil, ink,” as he puts it. The cartography is not a decorative backdrop: its density of lines does much of the work of a drawing. A tightly packed street network gives a dark mid-tone; open countryside crossed by a few contour lines leaves a highlight. He builds the face by darkening, linking and extending the lines that are already there, so that the portrait seems to grow out of the geography.

Look closely at any eye or jawline and you can usually follow a road or river straight through it. That double reading – a face and a place at once – is what makes the work so absorbing.

Detail of the same portrait showing roads integrated with facial features
Detail of the same portrait showing roads integrated with facial features. Gallery attribution: Ed Fairburn.

The maps behind the faces

The maps in this collection include street plans of Denver and Los Angeles, sheets of Australia and a First World War trench map of northern France. Fairburn has said he picks maps mainly for their visual qualities – the rhythm of their lines, the way they will hold tone – so the sitter is not a portrait of the place. Each piece carries two subjects at once: a face, and a document that described a real landscape long before the drawing began.

Map portrait drawing by Ed Fairburn (4)
Map portrait drawing by Ed Fairburn (5)
Map portrait drawing by Ed Fairburn (6)
Map portrait drawing by Ed Fairburn (7)
Map portrait drawing by Ed Fairburn (8)

Make a map page for your own travel journal

Fairburn’s portraits suggest a simple travel-journal idea. Take a city map from your trip, or draw your own walk, and mark the places that mattered: the bakery, the bridge, the café where it started raining. Then add marks that respond to the printed lines – shade the route you walked, draw a small object you found along it, or pick a colour that brings the day back. The page becomes a record of the journey that no photograph quite matches.

For another way of placing a scene inside an everyday object, see Peter Adams-Shawn’s Ringscapes photographs.

Map portrait drawing by Ed Fairburn (9)
Map portrait drawing by Ed Fairburn (10)
Map portrait drawing by Ed Fairburn (11)

Sources