Artist Statement

I make BizarreBeasts: primitive animal and humanoid shapes, hand-drawn in ink on paper, mixed media on canvas, and digitally. Every one is its own creature, and none of them ask permission to exist.

My practice begins with a single line and a commitment to where it goes. The pen goes down and stays down until the shape is finished. I do not plan a composition, reference a model, or sketch lightly to refine later. I do not erase. This is my style and my method: I am not trying to draw them accurately, I am trying to draw them true. What comes out is quirky, sarcastic, full of personality, and both bizarre and uncomfortably human.

The linework belongs to the oldest drawings humans made: the single unbroken figures cut into the Peruvian desert at Nazca, the animal carvings on the standing stones of Göbekli Tepe, the painted bulls and horses in the caves at Lascaux. Minimal marks, no perspective, a creature's essence caught through economy rather than accuracy. I have spent years studying that work in vintage books and photographs, and years traveling to ancient sites myself, and it is there in the silhouettes. The line is ancient. The color is not: high contrast, saturated, deliberately modern, so primitive form and present-day energy live in the same image.

As a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist I carry these figures into animation and interactive work. Building the software that rigs, animates, and powers them is not a technical step at the end of the process. It is a medium within the practice, alongside the ink and the canvas. I write my own tools so the software serves the drawing rather than the other way around, and the handmade energy of the original sketchbook mark survives into movement and voice.

Once they move, we see more of ourselves and the world around us in them. That is what the work is finally about: the uncomfortable space between who we present to the world and who we actually are, made visible so we can laugh at it instead of hiding from it.

From a line in a sketchbook to animation and games people play, the work travels from primitive origins to modern technique, and it is still the same line.