Artist Statement - First Draft

My primary goal in my work is to connect to people through stories. I use my characters and narratives to turn people inward towards their own lives; my drawings may remind them of something-- a person, a place, an event, or an experience or emotion. In opening up and placing my honest thoughts and perceptions on paper, telling them through familiar people and situations, I invite the viewer to do the same.

I generally work with materials that are clean, easy to read, and familiar, such as graphite, ink and digital drawing. My use of ink and Photoshop in particular evokes the entertainment-industry feel of a lot of my work. This in turn reflects shades of the "geek-culture" elements which inspired my very early practice. In many ways, my work still draws from the comics, cartoons and video games of my childhood and today. Most obviously, I gravitate toward a comic book aesthetic (specifically Japanese manga), and I am now concerned with applying elements of this aesthetic to a more versatile and wide-ranging body of work.

To this end, I have recently embarked on a bit of an artistic narrative experiment. What I call my “backwards fairy tales” are, in truth, various well-known stories (many made popular by the ubiquitous animated Disney films ranging from the 1930's to today) which I have retold simply by inverting them. Extracting all of the major plot elements, I reverse the order, and thus create an entirely new tale. The results are comic-page-like drawings which make use of some immediately familiar visuals to draw the viewer in, and then subvert expectations as the viewer notices that the known story is somehow off. This is a trend I plan to pursue, playing in the gray area between the comfortable and familiar, and the strange and unexpected.