The “DMV Roving Sketcher” Is Like a Courtroom Artist for Local Musicians

Since moving to DC from California in 2020 to study international relations at Georgetown, Galen Summers has become a familiar presence in the city’s music venues, where he draws portraits of performers during concerts. Calling himself the DMV Roving Sketcher, Summers documents the local music scene almost like a courtroom sketch artist, one band member at a time. He estimates that he has drawn more than 1,000 musicians at about 100 shows in the area, including prominent acts such as Ekko Astral, Spring Silver, and Dosser.

Summers shares the images on Instagram, and his fans include the musicians themselves. Guinevere Tully, who plays music as Rosslyn Station, made his sketch from her September 5 performance at Pie Shop her profile picture on Instagram, and Ekko Astral has used his sketch of vocalist Jael Holzman as their main image on Spotify and Bandcamp.

Originally, Summers started sketching people in bars as a way to connect; he found that showing people the drawings he’d made of them was more effective than the usual small talk. Eventually, he began focusing on live performers. That comes with some challenges, he says: Musicians, especially ones in the punk-inspired acts plentiful in DC, are constantly jumping around in a dimly lit room—not optimal conditions for figure portraiture. And the sheer number of band members who need to be drawn during a performance forces Summers to create work that might not always be perfect. (He makes a point of drawing every member in each band so nobody feels left out.)

His goal is both to capture a moment and to improve his skills. “As much as it’s doing a piece of art, for me it’s also, on some level, an exercise,” he says. “It’s kind of like going to the gym.”

Summers generally shows his work to the subject when he’s done, which can be a brutal moment for an artist even when the person isn’t a sweaty performer who may be several beers deep and has just finished yelling for half an hour. Musicians are usually pretty nice about it, he says. And because his subjects are onstage, he doesn’t have to feel awkward about staring while he sketches. “That’s the thing about art,” he says. “It’s just voyeurism with a little more skill.”

This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Washingtonian.

Molly Szymanski

Editorial Fellow