Hello Dreamers!
A personal project that I have been working on. It has been a while since I got back into drawing. I thought my hands would be rusty from disuse, but to my surprise, I picked up from where I left off last year. Occasionally, I would pour over my sketchbook with reference images propped up, hit an artist block and start over; though this time, I finished stage one within a day with me none the wiser. To be fair, some of my lines were squiggly and my circles weren't perfect. Overall, I didn't realize how much I missed working in the studio and losing myself into my own world of my own alternate reality. It felt great to get back into it again.
For my new dreamers out there, a refresher on what my practice entails. I play with memories and dreams in ways where I provoke the meaning of ideal utopia, city and living. Inspired by several artists, Hayao Miyazaki and Antoni Gaudi, you'll start to notice some of their elements I consistently draw from. My prints center around the foundation of childhood memory and the nostalgia it surrounds itself on. Meant to be magical and calming, I encourage the viewers to displace themselves from the real world and to put themselves in an imaginative space that is entirely their own.
This new edition in progress challenges how people differentiate one world to the next. Since my previous print "Ornate Dwelling", as one of my many examples, incorporates memory, it tends to apply in itself to one specific time and place. With the reoccurring theme of utopia or dystopia, this new project however will provoke the audience with the meaning of time. With no way in telling the time and place of this given space, I thought it would be interesting to change the theme up a bit and play with the notion and symbolism of time in a world where it simply does not exist. Perhaps it will be interpreted in a way that this alternate universe is another version of time and memory or perhaps there is none at all. We will find out as we continue this journey together.
Look forward to more works in progress in my next blog post.