ARTIST

STATEMENT

Artist Statement

For me, the way I create is: idea, design it, sketch it, paint it, do a layout, then photoshoot it. I try to keep it simple but it rarely is. When it comes to making art, airbrush is my preferred weapon of choice. Generally, there are 2 ways I use it, freehand and stencil. With using one or both these styles I can pretty much make any kind of paint-based art I want. If I add other mediums like pencil, oil, charcoal, or whatever I can get my hands on, the results I see have simply been… incredible.

As far as the content goes, what you are going to see is a lot of design on clothing, Comic based art, and the all-important “random” art. A lot of the art I try to make is loosely wrapped around the idea of “what if?” When I start down this rabbit hole I try to keep in mind that simple question, and then just go for it. I’ve learned that an aimless wondering can often bring you to some interesting conclusions.

Aimless, being part of the ingredients here, comes from when I was kid. From as early as I could remember I was always seen or being seen getting in trouble for drawing. I drew on anything and everything. Even when I wasn’t doing that I was knee-deep in cartoons, comics, science fiction, classical art, sculpture, (and maybe a strange twist) Dumas novels and other books of that nature. Being naturally introverted, reality wasn’t all that easy to deal with so the escape was obvious, imagination in as many forms as I could find. In the end the fun side effect of all that introverted head-in-the-clouds daydreaming imaginative way of growing up means when I see people always thinking inside the box, I often think…what a strange way to live.


Why the Odyssey?

These days I look around and I see that it’s customary to create something and then immediately post it for all to see. This was the route I took when I first started Cs Vintage Co. It would probably take me a week to a month to do a project while posting on some kind of social media along the way, every day, or sometimes every hour. I found that I was looking for instant recognition. That’s a no-brainer when you’re an artist. It’s one of the 3 mental drugs that most artists don’t want to admit they can’t get enough of. We all want to be told we did something cool. I’ve always feared that I would only make art just to get more likes and then wake up to be a slave to the idea… to do anything and everything to get the “like”. While I was doing Cs Vintage the first time, I found myself staying awake at night thinking about what I need to do next just so I can hurry to the deadline so I can get the work out to the viewer. It was stressing me straight to a place I didn’t want to be, which in turn made me stop all together. As time passed I observed other examples of social media burnouts.  People who were on top burning out by posting all the time about anything and almost everything they could. I didn’t want that to happen to me.

I knew if I was going to do this again I would have to do some restructuring, starting with facing the 3 things that all artists have to deal with at some point in their lives: the war on acknowledgment, approval and recognition. All artists know that these 3 demons can actually lead to hurting their work in some way, form or fashion. We wind up caring more for these terms than our work as a whole. To try and combat this or perhaps just hold them off as long as I could so I could focus, I had to make a hard choice. Usually the method is; idea, design, paint, photograph, post, and repeat. I already had literally hundreds of artistic ideas in mind, but I had to do something to make sure I didn’t end up feeling like I was chained to my shop, constantly painting just so I can keep cranking out content on a constant deadline to stay relevant to the viewer. Midnight October 7th, 2015, the hard answer was clear. Your life isn't really yours if you always care about what people think. And I'm sorry, if thats your thing then cool, but it needed to stop being my thing. So the strategy was to be as follows; Finish the project, record it, log it, and then move on to the next idea without posting anything, anywhere. No matter how long it took, I needed to do every single idea I could think of and when I finally ran out of art projects, only then, I would start to post what I had made for people to see. Now, 400+ finished projects later, the year is now 2020 and I’m ready… I think.

So why is it an odyssey? Think of it as if you and I are going to do some time traveling, and I’m at the helm. Within the span of 2015 to 2020, I’m going to take you on a journey backwards and forwards in the past to show you all the things I’ve made. The cool thing is, time is relevant. Whatever I show you, from whatever year, even if it’s not in chronological order, it won’t matter. It’s always new to you.

Enjoy the ride.

Cs Vintage Co. 2021 All Rights Reserved

Cs Vintage Co. art, airbrush, retro, old school, comics, vintage
Cs Vintage Co. art, airbrush, retro, old school, comics, vintage