Ed Loftus, an Oakland artist known for his hyper-realistic graphite drawings, sat in a cafe in downtown San Francisco last week talking about how he had become obsessed with his hair. “It sounds nuts, but all I could think about was getting my hair cut,” he said. “It’s like: I should get my hair cut. When am I going to get my hair cut? Why am I thinking about getting my hair cut? I wish I could stop thinking about getting my hair cut.”

His hair fixation has nothing to do with vanity, but rather with obsessive-compulsive disorder — an anxiety illness that causes intrusive thoughts and repetitive behavior like tapping or humming to quell constant uneasiness. It is a condition that Loftus, 38, has wrestled with since his childhood in England.

The fruits of Loftus’ obsessive nature are on display at the Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco, through Jan 21. “Big Things to Avoid,” Loftus’ first solo show in six years, features small pencil drawings that are at once photo-realistic and surreal: a skeleton walking through a mountainous landscape taken from an Ansel Adams photograph; the artist’s childhood sweetheart swarmed by birds against a hazy sky.

The works are rendered in painstaking detail — partly a result of the disorder — and a single piece can take up to five months to complete. In the last three years, Loftus has produced 10 works.

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Alfonso Cosio and Monique Delaunay, art consultants and cofounders of San Francisco Art Enthusiast, a website, had never heard of Loftus until this month, when they saw his show. At first, they thought the pictures were photo collages.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Cosio said. “I looked at it and said to my partner, ‘They’re photographs, right?’ She said, ‘No, the price list says they’re all graphite.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible.’”

Loftus draws in his home studio for about eight hours a day. He usually works from old family pictures or staged photographs of mundane objects like trash bags or videocassettes. He then combines those elements with existing photos and recreates the resulting images using graphite, in a months-long process of drawing across a single sheet of paper, from top left to bottom right, to avoid smudges.

Tweaking the images before rendering them in a photo-realistic way gives him a sense of empowerment, he said. “There’s a lot of satisfaction in the control.” One of the biggest components of obsessive-compulsive disorder, he explained, is gaining control.

Loftus imagines the finished work in his head before committing it to paper. “It’s whatever I’m thinking about in my life, whether it’s the obsessive nature of the work or my mortality or something like that,” he said.

One piece in the new collection is a drawing of two flies resting on an apple. “It seems misanthropic, but it’s kind of a hopeful piece,” he said. “It’s about finding companionship in a void and sharing something beautiful.”

Gregory Lind, the owner and director of the gallery, said disbelief was a common first reaction to Loftus’ drawings. “But it’s not just photo-realism that’s going on here,” he said. “The pieces convey isolation and a need for companionship.”

Loftus grew up in Dorset, England, a working-class county south of London. By 16, he had become an accomplished skateboarder despite struggling with O.C.D. He liked to draw but abandoned art because “I couldn’t make my hands do half the stuff I wanted them to do,” he said. “Skateboarding was physical, so it got out that weird energy, at least for a moment.”

At 18, Loftus came to San Francisco, where he couch-surfed and skated the vast expanses of concrete along the Embarcadero.

In his 20s, he took a drawing class at a community college. “I remember being really surprised by the first drawing,” he said. “It was a good moment.”

After a few years exploring various styles, Loftus settled on photo-realistic drawing. The meticulousness of the technique suited his illness, which he likened to a “belief system, almost like a religion. You believe that tapping a plate is going to make you feel a lot better, and it does, so it’s reality.”

While he has learned to suppress most outward symptoms of his condition, he still makes mental checklists of good things and bad things. “Like if you think of a bad color, you have to then think of a good color, so your mind is always battling.” He has seen therapists and tried Zoloft, an antidepressant drug, but it just made him sleepy, he said.

“That’s what’s nice about the drawing,” he said. “It’s the single-minded goal and the physical contact. You’re mentally immersed in it, and it’s a repetitive practice so it’s therapeutic.”

Loftus’ goal now is to create at least one new show every three years. He knows that his time-consuming process frustrates those with a stake in what he is doing, from art dealers to his wife.

“It’s been nice having a new show and having people respond well to it,” he said. “I guess it seems legit now and less like a character flaw.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.