STERLING — In the quiet hours between appointments, and when his day job finally gives way to the night, Ryan Jandrey studies faces the way others study maps, searching for structure, balance and truth. Each line carries weight, each shadow a decision that cannot be rushed or undone.

They’re works of art, which is what Jandrey enjoys creating in his spare time – and is also reaping awards from it.

In a room where muscle charts hang beside framed portraits of his work, Jandrey’s two worlds meet. By day, he works with clients at Bodyworx at Westwood Sports Complex in Sterling. By night, and sometimes in the margins between, he studies the human form again at his Dixon home studio, this time not as a trainer but as an artist, translating structure, symmetry and subtle expression onto paper with pencil, charcoal and graphite .

“I like the human form,” Jandrey said. ”I like faces. I like symmetry in faces. I like the bone structure and the musculature. You wouldn’t notice them unless you spent a lot of time looking at something. It’s the way my mind works — looking into details and figuring out how I can put those details onto a page. I like the challenge.”

Like the rich and varied contours of the face, Jandrey’s life in art wasn’t a straight line. What began as a childhood fascination eventually faded, but then returned about a decade ago, when he got some coal for Christmas — not a lump in his stocking, but artist’s charcoal.

“I really enjoyed it,” Jandrey said. ”I realized that I was somehow not that bad at it. Even after taking all of that time off, I was decent. So I picked it back up from there and got more seriously into it. It’s become part of what I do on a daily basis now.”

Constant repetition, online study and a self-imposed expectation to improve brought Jandrey’s focus to lean heavily toward portraiture, drawn to it by both its difficulty and its demand for precision. He has drawn occasional still-life and landscape works, but prefers the portraits. Even painting has been on his mind, and he hasn’t dismissed the idea of venturing into that one day.

The largest work in his office is a 30-by-40-inch drawing of his girlfriend, Michele Kreczmer. It was completed in 2025 with graphite, charcoal and a touch of white chalk on hand toned and stretched Stonehenge paper. With this, and his other portraitures, Jandrey takes plenty of reference pictures to guide him on his journey from what he sees in his mind to what he puts on paper.

He said it can be hard to capture the likeness of a subject in a piece and have someone look at it and recognize who it is immediately, especially if it’s someone they know.

“If they immediately recognize that it’s him or her, there’s a skill there, he said. “Not everything you draw has to look exactly like your reference photo, but getting the likeness is always a challenge that I like to meet.”

The challenge pulls him deeper into the details most people overlook, such as the quiet architecture beneath a face. Even the materials themselves demand adaptation. Early on, Jandrey had to unlearn what he thought he knew about drawing, such as using a charcoal pencil like he would a typical graphite one. He then learned more about charcoal’s advantages, moving it around the page, smudging and blending it to create smooth gradiations of tone, he said.

For the first couple of years, the work stayed mostly private. Then came a gradual shift of sharing pieces, accepting commissions and stepping into galleries. Jandrey first showed at The Next Picture Show in Dixon in 2021, and has taken his works throughout northern Illinois, including an exhibit in 2025 at NCI ArtWorks in Peru.

Shining a public light on his work brought him recognition — such was the case at the 76th Grand Detour Arts Festival in 2025. Along with some smaller pieces, Jandrey brought a piece that was as physically demanding as it was artistically ambitious: a large portrait of John Lennon, referencing a photograph of him from The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” period, built in layers across a stretched, toned surface.

The work, commissioned by Tipsy owner Linda Burkitt for her downtown bar, won Best of Show.

“It was a lot of layering of charcoal, carbon, graphite, some white chalk and some charcoal powder just because it’s such a big space,” Jandrey said. “I took it to Grand Detour, and that was honestly the most nerve-wracking thing because it probably weighs about 80 pounds with the really nice frame. It was set up and a lot of people were stopping to look at it, and I thought that, yeah, it was resonating with people and they were digging it. And it got people to come to my booth and check out the rest of my stuff.”

The piece changed how he saw his own work in the public space. When the recognition came, it wasn’t something he had been building toward; it arrived almost incidentally after the goal had already been met.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Jandrey said. ”All I wanted to do with get a clean show and get that piece back to Tipsy in one piece, meet some people and network with people — that’s all I expected. And to maybe sell a few pieces, which I did. It was the best I could hope for.”

Added confidence followed, but so did a broader sense of possibility, not just in where the work could go, but in who might connect with it along the way. Despite the recognition, the work itself hasn’t become easier. If anything, tension remains part of the process, such as an almost predictable point in each larger piece where doubt creeps in. When that happens, he’s learned, it’s not a signal to stop, but to push on.

“Almost every large scale drawing that I’ve done, and those I’ve put a lot of time into, there is a point where I start to not like it and literally rip off of the birchwood and just throw it in the trash,” Jandrey said. ”You get over that because you learn to trust the process. You learn to put more hours into this, and eventually it’s going to look good. It’ll look good, and I’ll trust myself to get it there.”

Having trust in the process anchors everything else. It’s what allows him to sit down, tune out the noise of the day and focus on the slow build of tone, line and form. Those quieter stretches make the work become something more than just putting pencil to paper.

“I like the aspect of art that allows you to kind of tune everything else out,” Jandrey said. ”The weight of everything else in the world right now can just be melted away by just sitting down and picking up a pencil, putting headphones on, turning on some music and getting to work. You have to make decisions and think with art, too, but you can shut the brain off and turn the feeling on, and just let it ride.”

When the work finally leaves Jandrey’s hands, whether it’s hung on a wall, placed in a client’s home, or gazed at by a stranger, there’s a thought about what it might mean to someone else.

“If someone looks at my art and it evokes some kind of emotion, then it’s awesome,” Jandrey said. ”That’s the goal. It’s also going to be different for everybody who looks at it, depending on their past experience and whatever they bring to the art.”

Find more of Ryan Jandrey’s artwork by looking him up on Instagram @jansauce85 and Facebook at Ryan Jandrey.