By pac

One of my older brothers was really gifted at drawing. When I was younger, I always thought to myself: if there was anyone that had a sense of style when it came down to drawing surely it was him. I even tried to copy him. I wish I could show you some of his originals. 

Style can become so unique to a person. The way they draw or paint things conveys something about themselves. From one’s choice of subject to the gestures they use to create marks on a paper, styles can be endless. I’ll talk more about style variations in another post when I have more to say and figure it out myself. But, I think you get the point. Style is something unique to each person and something they need to search for and produce. 

I’ve always been a drawer. Before I was a junior-scholar of urban religion – and many other things – I was first and foremost a “doodler.” When the mail came home, to me it was an opportunity to draw on something that had a blank white surface. Even some of my brother’s comic book bibles were full of my earliest stick-figure sketches of Gokus and Gohans with spikey hair, and maybe some muscles? I remember vaguely how those look. One time I got a red crayon and began to draw lines on the outside white wall of the house my family was renting. Not good days. Anyhow, while I was terrible at many other subjects at a young age, drawing, doodling and creating seemed to just work for me (at least the task, not always the end-product). 

Now as a working adult, I still draw, paint and create things– and want to document it. I even want to develop my own style and hopefully say some helpful remarks about it. 

As I grow older, I often have been approaching drawing and creating things in general with a very utilitarian mindset. I ask, “What will I gain from this?” Society and ideas of usefulness continually push us in that direction. But, maybe, that causes us to lose sight of the process of art-making and the way it’s connected to our identities. I mean this stuff comes out of us. Surely, it’s a bit reflective of who we are and the way we see things? 

So, as our world continues to go more artificial (at least in relation to technology), I will try and do one of the human things I know how to do: that is, create things using my own hands and mind, and hopefully make something that is distinct, reflective of who I am, and contains its own style that is undeniably human. Not to get too deep here. 

A lot of my drawings in the past few years have been following patterns like the one shown above. I like putting doodles (objects, sketches, scenes) within frames. The frames remind me of the straight lines seen in paintings by the dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1911). Mine are just not that symmetrical. I always liked the simplicity of Mondrian’s work: to me its colors and lines kind of at their finest. In my work, within the frames, my doodles reflect many kinds of art styles: maybe a middle ground between realistic stuff and more cartoons based stuff? Feature wise, I would like to try and aim for work that has some connections to street art (broadly defined) and/or pop art. Yet, the exact relations and subject matter doesn’t always need to make sense; I just hope it’s pleasing to the eye, and eventually reflective of its own style.

But I think frames are important. These multiple frames, at the same time, seem to cut up a piece yet hold it together. It’s this kind of tension that I like to capture. I also like the subject matter of pieces or shattered fragments — yet somehow and someway things remain held together. Sounds like my life. So when you see these images in frames just remember that. 

That’s all for today. Be on the look out for new images to see how my style develops.