Drawings

This page hosts an incomplete collection of drawings, digital and on paper, with accompanying poems and artist statements, from my long career of drawing. Visible here is the evolution of attention and memory, a lingering on specific subjects that may reveal things about myself and the world I experienced. Borrowing from art history, influenced by psychology, biology, and ecology, these drawings are meditations on human and natural forms, both abstract and physical.

 

Also, upcoming is a behind-the-scenes look at my process and history, starting from my earliest childhood drawings and the stories behind them.

The Clouds Taught Me how to See.

Desolate and dark. Sparse glimpses of the gray clouds that fold over on themselves like waves crashing over their home. 

I gotta be protected keep my head under wraps

Fold my arms and follow the law keeping myself from any traps

It’s a new world and the tide is coming in

Watching as the boulders shifting and the storm is breaking

I hear your voice like a siren in the sand

Telling me you need my hand

Here, I used vector art and digitally replicated a work of Gustave Dore from Paradise Lost: Lucifer meeting Beezlebub. This work, I believe, asks questions about free will, the formation of self, and the evolution of myth. This was reproduced into a silkscreen, which could be used to make prints. 

1
The Dreamer

2
The Drifter

My brief story explores the experiences of two people stuck in the corporate ladder like the grids of a comic book. The content they consume induces a sort of environmental amnesia, where you can see panels fade to white and blue. When they finally return home, they are surrounded by the patterns of the places they feel the most like themselves, and yet due to the toll exacted by work and constant advertisements and monitoring they are left to just stare as the night closes in on them and the panels shift to black. 
 
The stories are of different people in the same life, who they are changes what happens to them, and what they see.  My work wants to highlight how we can attempt to find our narrow windows of individuality within the structures imposed by the expectations to sell our time. 
 
The comparison of the two lives allows us to look at differences in time, personality, and experience. Each character has a slow morning, bogged down by their own habits, which are drilled into them by their surroundings. How the days change are based on how the person looks at the world. 
 
The person in life 1 is called the drifter. He is too overcome with sleepiness to notice the world around him and moves through life like the ships passing that he sees on his way home. 
 
The person in life 2 is called the dreamer. He finds himself focusing on the moments, like the blue skies, and his conversations with people. His dreams do not fit with the time that was made by our social structures, and his way home is riddled with trouble.
 
As a psychology and art major, I am interested in the way our experience is impacted by our environment. I hope to explore how we can connect more authentically to people by understanding the shared social context we live within.