ART FROM MAMARONECK, NY ~ 2023

portrait of a thoughtful foreigner

late july, 2022: a portrait of an acquaintance of mine. micron pen, a modified crappy chisel-tipped marker, acrylic. my favorite of a couple of portraits i did in the year and a half since august 2021, when aranxa ortega did a little portrait of me at 59 rivoli. i thought it was so magical that the act of putting lines on a page could reproduce a life in that way; that an image of a life could be captured and preserved by my own careful motions with a pen. i found that, in all my moments doing portraiture, there was always this one beautifully jarring instant when i filled in the eyes... all of a sudden, the marks i had put down returned the warmth of my gaze; all of a sudden, there she was.

untitled self portrait ; portrait submerged

mid october, 2022: micron pen, acrylic, dip pen/brush + ink. made in a kitchen ; november, 2022: micron pen, ink, brush, dip pen, paint marker (added the last day of 2022). a scope of mythical proportion drowned.

inkworld inception

november 17, 2022: water, ink, brush, dip pen, towel, tape, miscellaneous crap in my room. a litte fantasy about a day in which i have nothing to do, buried under dark-liquid-turned-solid many times over. a new motif in my work was born here: lines that look like text but mean nothing at all. there's something about a form that gestures at (but does not become) a sign...

desk in a dark world

november 30, 2022: embracing what was incepted in inkworld inception. water, ink, brush, dip pen, towel, miscellaneous crap in my room. a frame of inkworld.

the title is a secret

january 7, 2023: water, ink, brush, dip pen, towel, tape, miscellaneous crap in my room, paint marker. a good friend of mine laid some tape on a plain piece of watercolor paper and told me about something. when there was nothing left to be said, there was this^. love you bro <3

map-rock?

early february, 2023: micron pen, ink, paint marker, acrylic, water, spilt black tea. a map of?

untitled

january 3, 2023: i missed having faces in my work, so i started with a face. it ended up kind of being mine. water, ink, brush, dip pen, towel, miscellaneous crap in my room, paint marker.

OZYMANDIAS

first half of march, 2023: inspired by percy bysshe shelley. micron pen, paint marker, acrylic, ink + dip pen. an attempt to restore a sense of *life* in my work that portraiture used to give me. maybe this is the visage before it shattered... maybe it's the narrator... maybe its me reading the poem!

untitled blind contour ; life torn usunder and pieced together

june, 2022: self-portrait, buried a bit. some random pen, acrylic, flyers for the mamaroneck high school POC union. ; april 20, 2023: the result of an act of violence commited on a representation of a life because the composition was mid. born from it, a tapestry of life-parts. the horrors of human creativity!

living man

second half of april, 2023: paint marker, acrylic, ink + dip pen, micron. he has a mullet and five eyes; he is alive.

on the urban banyans of kolkata

written in april, recorded in may 2023: an audio piece i did for evan madin's mamaroneck public radio. soundcloud link here! it's also on the apple podcasts app but to hell with that.

p.s. shoutout to jill shoffiett, who was my art teacher at mamaroneck high school and while i made all of this. her framing of art-making in terms of composition and markmaking (formal aspects > nebulous ideas) made me relate to the act of creation on a level i never had before. also to shoutout to polina!