Sketchbook: March--August 2020, hand bound leather artist book composed of watercolor, gouache,
graphite, and colored pencil drawing on paper, 10.5" x 8" x 1.5" (opens to 10.5" x 16"), 2020
graphite, and colored pencil drawing on paper, 10.5" x 8" x 1.5" (opens to 10.5" x 16"), 2020
Sketchbook: June 2019--March 2020, hand bound leather artist book composed of watercolor, gouache,
graphite, and colored pencil drawing on paper, 10" x 8" x 1" (opens to 10" x 16"), 2019-2020
graphite, and colored pencil drawing on paper, 10" x 8" x 1" (opens to 10" x 16"), 2019-2020
Sketchbook: May 2019--September 2020, hand bound leather artist book composed of watercolor, gouache,
graphite, and colored pencil drawing on paper, 8" x 6.5" x 1" (opens to 8" x 13"), 2019-2020
graphite, and colored pencil drawing on paper, 8" x 6.5" x 1" (opens to 8" x 13"), 2019-2020
Artist/Artwork Statement
For the past couple of years, my artistic practice and living situation has been constantly changing from physically moving time zones to abandoning certain artistic practices. Even though these changes have occurred, I have kept my sketchbook practice as a constant variable. My sketchbooks have kept me diligently engaged with the act of image making as well as heightening my observational skills. I record of places I’ve traveled, lingering thoughts, interiors of many homes, landscapes and skyscapes from various windows, loved ones present and lost, reimagining works from art history, still lifes no longer still, and abstract aspirations of color and form. I understand “home as situation,” as a physical or mental space of comfort. Feeling like a nomad at times, I am able to live in the pages I have bound for this single purpose of creating comfort and stability through drawing.
I use drawing as my principle technique of making art. My sketchbooks serve as a vessel to generate ideas for larger bodies of work whether it may be preliminary sketches or finished props of larger installations. My work is invested in exploring purposes in life while feeling disconnected, grappling with a sense of mortality with the notion that my life (every life) becomes a speck in an infinite line of time. I’ve become infatuated with the act of observing the life cycle of flowers and associating them to how life must feel like. I use flora as a universal signifier to resemble the fragility of life, the beautiful ever expanding, regenerating being. A recurring image of a malleable mound with orifices as sight, is drawn as a representation of my soul’s humanity — possessing the power to shape the landscape of reality, cast purpose to existence and act as a conductor of the energy called life. Many of the influences in my work derive from past experiences of life lost and perpetual hardships capturing life’s sincerity through ideas of my own existential melancholia. I reference the works of William Blake and musical artists such as rap duo OutKast, post punk band IDLES, Tejano group La Mafia who explore and observe the complexity of life through their respective works.
For the past couple of years, my artistic practice and living situation has been constantly changing from physically moving time zones to abandoning certain artistic practices. Even though these changes have occurred, I have kept my sketchbook practice as a constant variable. My sketchbooks have kept me diligently engaged with the act of image making as well as heightening my observational skills. I record of places I’ve traveled, lingering thoughts, interiors of many homes, landscapes and skyscapes from various windows, loved ones present and lost, reimagining works from art history, still lifes no longer still, and abstract aspirations of color and form. I understand “home as situation,” as a physical or mental space of comfort. Feeling like a nomad at times, I am able to live in the pages I have bound for this single purpose of creating comfort and stability through drawing.
I use drawing as my principle technique of making art. My sketchbooks serve as a vessel to generate ideas for larger bodies of work whether it may be preliminary sketches or finished props of larger installations. My work is invested in exploring purposes in life while feeling disconnected, grappling with a sense of mortality with the notion that my life (every life) becomes a speck in an infinite line of time. I’ve become infatuated with the act of observing the life cycle of flowers and associating them to how life must feel like. I use flora as a universal signifier to resemble the fragility of life, the beautiful ever expanding, regenerating being. A recurring image of a malleable mound with orifices as sight, is drawn as a representation of my soul’s humanity — possessing the power to shape the landscape of reality, cast purpose to existence and act as a conductor of the energy called life. Many of the influences in my work derive from past experiences of life lost and perpetual hardships capturing life’s sincerity through ideas of my own existential melancholia. I reference the works of William Blake and musical artists such as rap duo OutKast, post punk band IDLES, Tejano group La Mafia who explore and observe the complexity of life through their respective works.