My work focuses on the spectrum of human emotion through imagery of surreal, often grotesque, figures being distorted and transformed. The raw scenes act as a literal translation of what's inside of us all. By dissecting the human body and revealing what's underneath the skin, I am able to metaphorically show what it is like to battle one's own uncontrollable chaos.
I primarily work with oil paint on canvas, as its flexibility allows for me to create a dramatized figure through rich colors, harsh lighting and contorted poses. To create these scenes I take staged reference photos of myself and draw them into complex positions directly on the canvas. I try to balance how much is taken from reference and how much is my intuition by moving fluidly through subconscious imagination to shape the final image. The result is a semi-convinicing scene grounded in anatomy but lacking all real logic.
I am inspired by the dark media I consumed as a child. Growing up I was exposed to 80s and 90s Sci-Fi and horror movies because they were my fathers favorite movies. “Alien”, “Hellraiser”, “Akira” and even “The Necronomicon” by H.P. Lovecraft became movies and books I loved as well. My other major influence came from medical books that belonged to my father. Some books showed basic dissection and others showed diseases that affect humans. It is what has caused my interest in distorting the human figure and not holding back on how graphic it is. I have now started to create associations with the way the body looks and the emotions it feels. Instead of trying to understand these phenomena in the body I let my curiosity fly and distort it more.
