“7-11 Prophet” Gouache and ink on paper 14” x 11” 2020, $350.00
My work is an homage to my youth, my trolls are portraits of myself and my friends. I paint from fragmentary memories, I over-exert fleeting moments, I mysticize and romanticize them. Growing up as a queer, wayward teenager in a place like New Jersey you do nothing but overromanticize and fancy yourselves as these urban legends, as the ghosts that haunt the woods and malls. I want to paint my teenage backdrops and confidants the way I saw them then, I want the living rooms to feel like refuges, and the 7-11 parking lots to feel like sacred spaces. I draw huge influence from artists like Kim Dorland and Rebecca Morgan, whose work is brutally honest love notes to their upbringings and hometowns. I work in an illustrative style with acrylics and gouache to further these fictionalized but biographical subjects and give a surreal quality to an otherwise plain seeming world.