What are you doing for your senior project?

For my senior project, I'm doing a couple of large scale paintings. Mostly abstract works using oils and acrylics and spray paint. The whole focus of it is supposed to be this really childlike fever dream, where everything's goofy and fun, and it's all really amateurish looking, but on a grand scale.

How many of those are you making?

Two right now, with a couple small sculptures to surround the pieces.

Oh, wow. So it's really multimedia.

Yeah. I'm trying to get a lot visually there. I'm often working in multimedia. It's just kind of how my process goes. Usually, if I'm doing really big canvas work, I like to sketch it out with spray paint and then move on to layering.

What types of themes are you expressing and what do you usually express in your work?

I generally have characters picking flowers, looking at bugs and stuff like that. So I have this creature that I draw a lot. That is just this big, weird pink figure that looks creepy at first, but he's really just digging around in the dirt or eating some berries or just looking at bugs. I want this weird, creepy looking monster at first to be like, it's so big and monstrous, but then you just see, "Oh, he's literally just looking at a centipede crawl along." I want it to be very innocent in terms of what you're seeing, but also still kind of confusing and repulsive at the same time.

Where do you plan to go with that, beyond this project and beyond college?

Definitely just kind of getting my works to become larger scale. I feel like the more grandiose the size of the paintings, the better I can convey these themes, as well as just maybe working with even more mediums on top of the canvas to make things look goopier or even more gross, like get plaster dripping everywhere on this huge 10 foot canvas would get it to look really disgusting. It's really the point.

 That's a really interesting point of view. Are you planning to go into gallery work with that? I know that's the plan for a lot of Fine Artists.

Yeah, I would love to do gallery work, definitely up my alley.

What are some of your artistic inspirations that you look up to?

Artists, I would definitely say are people like Christian Rex van Minnen, he takes a different direction, but kind of a similar vein of what I do. Where his stuff is really focused on being heavily inspired by old masters' works to make these weird heaps of flesh with like gelatin surrounding them and these weird stick and poke tattoos. But they're beautifully rendered. I mean, it's hyper real, but it's still disgusting. And the tattoos are all nonsense. It's like Russian prison tattoos, but it visually is so striking and interesting. That definitely is an inspiration for me, as well as an artist, Aaron Johnson who dipped socks in acrylic and then put them on a canvas to make the most putrid looking thing I've ever seen. I mean, socks normally on a canvas would be weird, but you dip them in paint and then they dry so weird and so disgusting. So I would definitely put those two up there as inspiration.

Have those always been inspirations of yours or have you found them along the way here at school?

I've definitely found them along the way. I would say when I was first realizing what I wanted to do for art years and years back, it would be graffiti and street art and stuff like that. I taught myself how to do art mostly through redrawing cartoons and spray painting on random buildings. So that's kind of how I came up and why I think everything is so goofy for me because I started out pretty goofy. So I'm just keeping along that trajectory.

Why choose to go into fine art specifically?

It definitely just felt like the right progression for me personally. I wanted to expand my horizons more. I was always interested in the arts in general, so it's just that need for knowledge. And I didn't want to go to college for really anything else. I mean, it's either I go for art or I please the parents and I go for pharmaceuticals. There's no real win there. So I might as well have chosen the thing that I really just was totally more invested in personally.

A lot of people have expressed a sort of battle with the parental figures over going into art.

I understand the concern, you know, it's a coin toss.

You never really know where you're going to end up with art. I think other career paths have a lot more of an actual path that you can follow.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, you get out of college, you get an internship somewhere or a smaller job and you just work there and keep moving up. It's like, you either get the 0.01% chance and you're popular at 18 on Instagram or you die by 30 drawing kids books. There's no win, but I'm here for it.

 Have you had any "professional" experience in art?

Not necessarily. I've definitely sold a painting or a drawing here. It's been very small successes for myself, but I also haven't really thrown myself out there that much. I've just wanted to hone my craft enough to where I was confident in the work I was putting out before.

How would you feel that your peers or the faculty, or just the community here at school has that impacted you and shaped your journey as an artist?

So I am new to the school. I just transferred here this semester and I have felt nothing but welcomed and very helped by both peers and teachers and everyone really. My teachers have been fantastic in terms of taking interest in what I do for work and wanting to push me in the right directions to get me to be successful. And I would say all of the seniors that I've talked to have been very supportive and very helpful in terms of their critique with putting me in the right mind frame to keep making the work that I should be making.

It's good that you feel welcome right now with the way that everything is. Cause I know it's hard for people to find friends. Sort of on the pandemic topic, what does your studio look like right now because I know a lot of people are just working right out of their rooms?

My studio is a mess. I can not organize work for the life of me. I mean, I haven't spent even that much time in the studio itself, but I still managed to make it look like a tornado ran through there. I always have towels everywhere just for cleaning up paints. There's little stray pastels everywhere, but that's just kind of how I work, in a pigsty It just feels right.

Controlled chaos.

Exactly. Until I'm cussing out, looking out for where my ultramarine and I just don't know where it is.

What type of response do you want to get from your work?

So like I said, I definitely want people to, at first look at it and be like, "Whoa, that's a really creepy looking monster." And then for them to actually process what they're looking at and be like, "Oh, he's just playing around in the dirt or something." It's very innocent, but also through texture and through mixed media, I want them to be slightly repulsed by what they're looking at because I want the paintings to be goopy. And I want them to look at how slimy everything looks and be like, "That would be disgusting if I touched it or if I saw it anywhere in nature." And I want to agree with them too. When I look at my paintings, I want to be kind of grossed out even while I'm making it. And I want the viewer to feel that as well.

Are you trying to incorporate any actual tactile things into that?

Oh, for sure. I've worked a little bit with just kind of dragging paint, like canvases on dirt and leave leaves to just dry under paint and people just poke at it. And it's fun. I like when people get to actually interact with the art and feel how disgusting it is. So it's definitely something I've been thinking about with more and more of my work is the interaction with the viewer, because I feel like there's a lot of art where it's just, the viewer stands two feet away from the painting while there's a velvet rope in front of them and they just simply have to look and appreciate it. And I don't know, it's just so boring to me. I feel like there's so much more that could be done to make it well, I guess in my terms, disgustingly interesting. I know there's something that could really teach art museums: let the viewer interact with it, let them get down and dirty with that million dollar painting. 

I want to leave off with asking do you have any advice for underclassmen, for incoming freshmen, for other people who are going to come up to be a senior after you?

Well, definitely foundation is core. I hated my figure drawing classes, but just do them. You might think, if you're someone who is dead set on going an abstract route, that you don't need the fundamentals or foundation. "Why do I need to draw this person's elbow so well?" I have never understood in my own brain why I needed to know how to shade a clavicle until I was like, "Oh, well there's a little crevice there. How do I shade it correctly? If only I listened to the clavicle, I would know!" Just do the fundamental work. I hated it. I hated my perspective class. I hated my 2D design class because I thought the work was stupid. Just appreciate it for what it is and pull out anything that you can from it.