When did you first start getting into art?
I’ve always liked to doodle. When I was in middle school my art teacher had us do this bug thing and when mine came out a little better than everyone else I really got interested in the difference it made with the contrast of black and white. And from there I started to dive in it a little bit more. I also grew interest by watching my older brother make cool stuff with just paper. That’s what kind of intrigued me about it. Just the idea of creating.
So your older brother is an artist too?
He is. He doesn’t do as much as he should. I really think he would make an amazing tattoo artist because of his lines. I have more freedom in the things that I do but he just likes the precision. One thing I would really like to do one day is collaborate with him. It would be like solid and water. So he’s kind of like concrete and I’m like something that blows.
Do you have a type or style of art you would classify yourself as?
Surreal realism. I like designing things into other things. It’s like the object could really be there but there is a slight edge to it. I like nature and I like people and I like bringing them together with color and sometimes the colors aren’t real. I like to change it up and never work on one thing specifically. It’s always fun just learning and seeing what things I can do to make it different. Even if it a mistake it makes it fun.
Do you have a favorite technique?
I like to do self portraits and do the same thing I do with the surrealism, to put a picture inside a picture, but I am also fascinated by death so there is a lot of bones and skulls in my work. It is because with the bones you can actually shade it deeper shades and there’s a lot more lines in it than you would find in a face. I also love nature. I find a lot of inspiration in nature. The best places I like to go find myself is just to go on a walk or hike and have all the sounds around me and my self breathing. It’s just like clarity. I love the things that haven’t been polluted.
Where can we find your art?
I have done some commission mural work, but most of my stuff is done on a canvas or an alternative canvas. My thing is I don’t want to spend money on things I can get from the store. I’d rather find something, whether that’s trash or just something that I find, that already has a personality to it. I have recently been into windows and painting over the front of them. One of my favorite experiments was this time my friend pulled all these old nails out from his porch and nailed them into a frame and the painting itself and I painted them to the right colors so it would kind of blend into it. It was really cool.
What advice do you have for beginning artists?
The best feeling about making art is losing track of time and losing rack of what you are doing like a meditation. It feels like getting inside your art and then stepping back to see you’ve created something you didn’t know you were doing. It’s a process for anybody to start up anything because it’s a bit scary to take on something so big. So the best thing for me what I have found is just to stop worrying about what I am doing and just let myself create. The hardest thing is to actually finish it because you can always add more but sometimes you just have to say it’s the right place and just walk away from it. Just let it be itself.
