There’s something quite fascinating about Aztec and Mayan art. I imagined a new mythology where the beasts battled the humans to get the Light. The Lightbearer is the protector and keeper of the Light, and spends his life battling the beasts that would devour it.
Just after college, I moved to Los Angeles. I rented an industrial space with high ceilings, and decided to hold gallery shows there, every few months. Introspective was one such show.
The idea started as a joke. In the art world, a retrospective was a type of gallery show celebrating an artist’s life and body of work. As a new artist, there would be no “retrospective” for my work. Instead I thought it’d be fun to do an “introspective”, as a series of self-portraits and explorations.
I’m not sure if it was a successful project, but it was definitely fun to do.
Sometimes I like to play with the simple relationships of colors and shapes, without the need to tell a story, or follow a certain subject matter. A lot of times these explorations can inform further works. But sometimes they just act as meditative breaks.
This is a loose collection of images from a few of my sketchbooks.
One lazy Sunday, my girlfriend, Sam, and I decided to do some painting. I ended up making two little abstract yellow paintings that I liked. Later I ran those paintings through a variety of AI models and let the computer create variations.
My senior thesis art show in college was an exploration of the theme of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Since then, I find myself revisiting this theme often.
Cabbagehead started with a single sketch. I found an old book of dolls and dedicated a sketchbook to illustrating my versions of them. One of the dolls had a cracked, peeling head, that I drew as a sort of leafy, layered texture. Later I used this image to form new hybrid images with a website called Artbreeder.
Oni are a type of mythological Japanese demon or monster. They are featured prominantly in sculpture in and around many temples in Japan. The images here, are my own take on the faces.
Myopia started as a fun exploration of microscopic critters, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the world in which the live. But too not long after I started the project it found its way into becoming a tiny video game.
I’ve always loved the old classic cartoon look of Hannah-Barbera and the UPA style of the 50s and 60s. I wanted to explore this retro vibe in a series of clustered faces.
VERY VERY is an idea for a graphic novel I had years ago. The basic premise was that in the future, after all the humans were gone, all that would remain would be the AI robots that we created. And those robots would sell each other upgrades and parts the same way we sold each other clothes.
But then recently, I thought it would be more fun to actually involve an AI in the project. So I trained a Machine Learning model on a huge batch of my sketches. This is what it came up with.
This project started on my iPad, using various apps to process a bunch of photos and illustrations of mine. I liked the results so much, I started further processing them, in a weird feedback loop.
Each month I record and release music videos to my Patreon page. Sometimes they are acoustic or live versions of my stuff, or NMK songs. Sometimes they are covers. And sometime they are new, previously unreleased tracks, or in-progress songs from upcoming projects.
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