About
|
For me, art is a process of constant trial and error. I am constantly experimenting with new ideas, constantly sketching. I go through around 20-30 pages of paper a day with sketches. Some days, I’ll use over 50 sheets of paper on sketches alone. Most of these sketches are done very quickly; sometimes a sketch takes fewer than ten seconds.
This is a necessary part of the artistic process. In order to come up with great ideas, my mind has to be loose. When I try too hard, I am constantly self-critical, I worry if what I produce is good enough, and I think too hard about each mark I make. All these conscious thoughts cloud my head, preventing subconscious ideas from rising to the surface. But when I trust myself to create and don’t worry about the outcome – that is when my best artistic ideas emerge. To me, letting go of inhibition is the most important part of creating great art because it allows me to access my subconscious mind. |
|
When I begin drawing, I am the one who is drawing. I consciously decide where to put my pen, what to draw. But as I draw, this conscious control over what I do slips away. Instead of consciously deciding what to make, it is like I am watching myself create. My hand is guided by my subconscious, and my conscious mind is a spectator.
David Lynch (the greatest director of all time, in my opinion) compared the process of coming up with ideas to that of catching fish. “Ideas are like fish,” he says. “You don't make the fish. You catch the fish.” “If you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.”
I believe deep in the subconscious is where the greatest artistic ideas live. These ideas are always there, in my brain. But they are trapped beneath the surface of my thinking. Drawing freely allows these ideas to come to the surface. But it takes patience, like fishing. Some days, I will use up half a notebook with drawings, and not a single one of them will be good. But all it takes is one great idea to inspire many works of art.
Once these ideas emerge, I consciously decide which sketches look good. And when I find an artistic idea that I like, I will consciously decide to make similar pieces. I often do many drafts of the same idea. Each time, these ideas come out slightly different.
For example, my many line drawings began as absent-minded squiggles. But when I noticed that these squiggles, when drawn in a particular way, appeared to shimmer and vibrate, I decided to make many more. And with each draft, I observed what looked good and what did not: forms seemed to create the strongest sense of movement and vibration? To read more about line drawings, click here.
Often, when I draw, I feel my work start to vibrate. I enter a different state of mind, one where the whole world feels like it’s vibrating – like static on a TV screen – and everything is pulsing with burning hot energy. Everything feels exciting and electric and alive. The rest of the world fades out, and all that matters is whatever I’m working on.
This is a feeling I want to share with others through my art. I want to make art that feels like it’s shaking and vibrating and pulsing with life. I want to make art that feels immersive, that makes viewers feel like they are exiting reality when they look at it. I want my art to create an experience. I want to create art that makes people feel physically different when they look at it. This is what I feel when I look at my art.
And many people tell me they experience the same. They notice that some of my pieces seem to shimmer and vibrate. They start to see colors in my work that are not there.
Some people even tell me that my art makes them tremendously uncomfortable – that they cannot stand to look at it. To me, this is not a criticism, but rather a tremendous compliment. Cesar A. Cruz once said, “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” This sentiment has been echoed by great artists such as Willem de Kooning (who, until the sale of Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017, created the most expensive painting in world history). I believe an indicator of great art is an ability to change the way you feel. If a work of art (whether it’s visual art, film, music, writing, etc.) makes me feel uncomfortable, that’s how I know it is really good. I love any art that makes me feel something different and new.
And that’s exactly what I strive to do with my own art. If I make people feel intense discomfort with my work, I consider this a great success because my art was able to strike them on a deep enough emotional level in order to make them feel something new.
And a lot of my art explores feelings and ideas that are uncomfortable.
I love to explore negative feelings in art and transform them into something beautiful; for example, anxiety. Many of my pieces attempt to capture the feeling of extreme anxiety – the feeling like everything is chaotic and moving fast and out of control and nauseating – and express this visually in a way that is uncomfortable, yet mesmerizing. Sometimes, I express in abstract pieces that seem to vibrate in an almost nauseating way, yet I find myself almost unable to look away from these pieces. This somewhat echoes the feeling of being anxious about something: it tears you apart inside to think about this thing, yet you cannot stop thinking about it. Many of the faces I draw also convey the feeling of panic in a vivid and accurate way. I myself find these pieces quite uncomfortable. And this discomfort makes them beautiful.
Sexuality is another big theme in many of my pieces; for example in line drawings. Sex seeps through a lot of my art in subtle ways. Thus, viewers may not be consciously aware that they are viewing something sexual when looking at my art, but subconsciously, they are imbued with a feeling of sexuality.
And sex makes a lot of people uncomfortable in modern American society. I think this has a lot to do with American societal norms and the way we are raised. From an early age, we are told to not touch our genitals. We are conditioned to wear clothes and be ashamed of our nudity. We are sheltered from images of sex and nudity as children (most of us, anyway) – movies with sex or full nudity are often rated R and considered not appropriate for children. As we grow and become more aware of our own sexuality, we are taught to refrain from discussing sex in non-intimate settings. I believe most of us are very sexually repressed creatures.
And thus, art imbued with sexuality such as my own has the capacity to make people pretty uncomfortable; furthermore, this discomfort for viewers is elevated by the fact that people often do not know why they are uncomfortable when looking at my art. While I feel a lot of my art is quite evocative of sex, very few people have told me that they see this in my art, even with pieces that – to me – are obviously sexual. I still believe the sexuality in my work reaches most viewers on a subconscious level, eliciting feelings of discomfort in some. And feeling discomfort without knowing why makes everything all the more uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable to not know why you feel what you do – or even not know what you are feeling at all – when looking at a work of art.
Much of my art explores the tension between the conscious and subconscious mind. I view my subconscious mind almost like another person living inside my head. This person is trapped in my subconscious. He has little agency over my actions. He cannot communicate clearly his desires. He can communicate primarily through feelings: I’ve found the more detached I am from my subconscious – the more I repress thoughts, desires, worries, etc. – the more I am filled with a sense of anxiety, irritation, and sadness. Almost as if there is someone inside my head banging as loud as he can on the bars of a prison cell, only I don’t know where the sound is coming from.
Art gives my subconscious mind a vessel for expression. When I create art, my conscious mind steps back and subconscious instincts take over. Art, to me, is an almost therapeutic process that allows me to become more in touch with myself. And what I put onto paper is often a really pure representation of subconscious emotion I may not have even been aware of. Sometimes, I finish a piece of art and it is almost as if it was made by another person.
I find this is similarly true when I write music. In addition to visual art, music is another great creative vessel in which I express my subconscious. I’ll often start writing lyrics by singing, uninhibited, over a musical composition I’ve written; and then I wait for words and melodies to emerge. Sometimes, I’ll write lyrics, and it’s as if they’re written by another person.
The process for my music writing – similar to my art – begins with uninhibited experimentation; and similar to art, this is followed by conscious manipulation of ideas born from my subconscious. I consciously decide which chords and melodies I like. I consciously form lyrics that are cohesive and unique and have pleasing rhyme schemes.
To listen to some of my music, click here.
David Lynch (the greatest director of all time, in my opinion) compared the process of coming up with ideas to that of catching fish. “Ideas are like fish,” he says. “You don't make the fish. You catch the fish.” “If you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.”
I believe deep in the subconscious is where the greatest artistic ideas live. These ideas are always there, in my brain. But they are trapped beneath the surface of my thinking. Drawing freely allows these ideas to come to the surface. But it takes patience, like fishing. Some days, I will use up half a notebook with drawings, and not a single one of them will be good. But all it takes is one great idea to inspire many works of art.
Once these ideas emerge, I consciously decide which sketches look good. And when I find an artistic idea that I like, I will consciously decide to make similar pieces. I often do many drafts of the same idea. Each time, these ideas come out slightly different.
For example, my many line drawings began as absent-minded squiggles. But when I noticed that these squiggles, when drawn in a particular way, appeared to shimmer and vibrate, I decided to make many more. And with each draft, I observed what looked good and what did not: forms seemed to create the strongest sense of movement and vibration? To read more about line drawings, click here.
Often, when I draw, I feel my work start to vibrate. I enter a different state of mind, one where the whole world feels like it’s vibrating – like static on a TV screen – and everything is pulsing with burning hot energy. Everything feels exciting and electric and alive. The rest of the world fades out, and all that matters is whatever I’m working on.
This is a feeling I want to share with others through my art. I want to make art that feels like it’s shaking and vibrating and pulsing with life. I want to make art that feels immersive, that makes viewers feel like they are exiting reality when they look at it. I want my art to create an experience. I want to create art that makes people feel physically different when they look at it. This is what I feel when I look at my art.
And many people tell me they experience the same. They notice that some of my pieces seem to shimmer and vibrate. They start to see colors in my work that are not there.
Some people even tell me that my art makes them tremendously uncomfortable – that they cannot stand to look at it. To me, this is not a criticism, but rather a tremendous compliment. Cesar A. Cruz once said, “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” This sentiment has been echoed by great artists such as Willem de Kooning (who, until the sale of Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017, created the most expensive painting in world history). I believe an indicator of great art is an ability to change the way you feel. If a work of art (whether it’s visual art, film, music, writing, etc.) makes me feel uncomfortable, that’s how I know it is really good. I love any art that makes me feel something different and new.
And that’s exactly what I strive to do with my own art. If I make people feel intense discomfort with my work, I consider this a great success because my art was able to strike them on a deep enough emotional level in order to make them feel something new.
And a lot of my art explores feelings and ideas that are uncomfortable.
I love to explore negative feelings in art and transform them into something beautiful; for example, anxiety. Many of my pieces attempt to capture the feeling of extreme anxiety – the feeling like everything is chaotic and moving fast and out of control and nauseating – and express this visually in a way that is uncomfortable, yet mesmerizing. Sometimes, I express in abstract pieces that seem to vibrate in an almost nauseating way, yet I find myself almost unable to look away from these pieces. This somewhat echoes the feeling of being anxious about something: it tears you apart inside to think about this thing, yet you cannot stop thinking about it. Many of the faces I draw also convey the feeling of panic in a vivid and accurate way. I myself find these pieces quite uncomfortable. And this discomfort makes them beautiful.
Sexuality is another big theme in many of my pieces; for example in line drawings. Sex seeps through a lot of my art in subtle ways. Thus, viewers may not be consciously aware that they are viewing something sexual when looking at my art, but subconsciously, they are imbued with a feeling of sexuality.
And sex makes a lot of people uncomfortable in modern American society. I think this has a lot to do with American societal norms and the way we are raised. From an early age, we are told to not touch our genitals. We are conditioned to wear clothes and be ashamed of our nudity. We are sheltered from images of sex and nudity as children (most of us, anyway) – movies with sex or full nudity are often rated R and considered not appropriate for children. As we grow and become more aware of our own sexuality, we are taught to refrain from discussing sex in non-intimate settings. I believe most of us are very sexually repressed creatures.
And thus, art imbued with sexuality such as my own has the capacity to make people pretty uncomfortable; furthermore, this discomfort for viewers is elevated by the fact that people often do not know why they are uncomfortable when looking at my art. While I feel a lot of my art is quite evocative of sex, very few people have told me that they see this in my art, even with pieces that – to me – are obviously sexual. I still believe the sexuality in my work reaches most viewers on a subconscious level, eliciting feelings of discomfort in some. And feeling discomfort without knowing why makes everything all the more uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable to not know why you feel what you do – or even not know what you are feeling at all – when looking at a work of art.
Much of my art explores the tension between the conscious and subconscious mind. I view my subconscious mind almost like another person living inside my head. This person is trapped in my subconscious. He has little agency over my actions. He cannot communicate clearly his desires. He can communicate primarily through feelings: I’ve found the more detached I am from my subconscious – the more I repress thoughts, desires, worries, etc. – the more I am filled with a sense of anxiety, irritation, and sadness. Almost as if there is someone inside my head banging as loud as he can on the bars of a prison cell, only I don’t know where the sound is coming from.
Art gives my subconscious mind a vessel for expression. When I create art, my conscious mind steps back and subconscious instincts take over. Art, to me, is an almost therapeutic process that allows me to become more in touch with myself. And what I put onto paper is often a really pure representation of subconscious emotion I may not have even been aware of. Sometimes, I finish a piece of art and it is almost as if it was made by another person.
I find this is similarly true when I write music. In addition to visual art, music is another great creative vessel in which I express my subconscious. I’ll often start writing lyrics by singing, uninhibited, over a musical composition I’ve written; and then I wait for words and melodies to emerge. Sometimes, I’ll write lyrics, and it’s as if they’re written by another person.
The process for my music writing – similar to my art – begins with uninhibited experimentation; and similar to art, this is followed by conscious manipulation of ideas born from my subconscious. I consciously decide which chords and melodies I like. I consciously form lyrics that are cohesive and unique and have pleasing rhyme schemes.
To listen to some of my music, click here.