How long have you been making art? And how has your style evolved over time?

I was always drawing comics and cartoons with my friends in school, but I didn’t think of myself as an artist until senior year of high school. I decided I wanted to become an illustrator halfway through the year and scrambled to put together a portfolio the month before college applications were due. Back then, I wanted to be a tattoo artist more than anything. My style then was very graphic, somewhere between traditional tattoo and ignorant style which is very contemporary. I went into my first year of college knowing nothing of fine art conceptually or historically. Honestly, I never learned much from the classes I took, but they exposed me to the art world. As I explored, my style changed. I still do graphic works occasionally, but my paintings and digital works are stylistically a polar opposite from where I started.

What and who inspires your artwork?

I watch a lot of arthouse films which will often give me something to think about, or a tone or feeling I want to recreate in a piece. The relationship between a film and an audience is very important to me There are movies made to entertain you and there are ones that you watch alongside and think with. These are not mutually exclusive, however I often find myself looking for more challenging movies to take away a feeling from it, and to develop [that feeling] into a visual work. Some of my favorite directors are David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman and Yorgos Lanthimos. In terms of painters and other visual artists, most of my favorites are ones I’ve either seen or met through social media. Jeremy Saborio (@rebirthcastle) and Scratch Williams (@scratchwilliams) are probably my favorite painters, and seeing others my age doing great work always pushes me to want to not necessarily do better, but to experiment more. I find that meeting other artists through social media has heavily impacted my style. Zach Thompson is another big inspiration. In terms of classics, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Irwin and Francis Bacon are artists I look to a lot.

What’s your creative process like? How do you go about starting a new work?

For digital I work from a lot of scans of old photos found on internet archives or thrift stores. I’m interested in reduction as an artform, often piecing together and painting over several photos or small selections of a scan like an exquisite corpse. An independent study I was recently developing was focused on using digital techniques to manipulate and deconstruct analog work, then reprinting or repurposing the pieces as physical or installation works to represent the deterioration of memory and the consistency of unreliability. For my physical paintings I’ve really only begun exploring the medium recently. I focus more on form and composition above all else, even concept sometimes. I’m less of a conceptual artist and more visually-based because I’d rather create something beautiful that I want to see rather than something that explicitly attempts to communicate with others. This is not to say I don’t wish for people to connect with my work; I just want to make work that transcends. I will say that in my physical paintings something that interests me is the autonomous design of nature, and my lines and brush strokes often try to mimic organic forms.

Do you have a favorite piece you’ve made so far? Or one you’re most proud of?