Literature

Reading has been one of my favorite things to do, since I got a firm grasp on it. Whether it be books, comics or magazine interviews/articles, if I’m not sketching or working on art there’s a 50/50 chance I’m reading something. I believe the reason reading plays such a heavy roll in my daily life is because of the fact that I didn’t pick it up as quickly as most children. In kindergarten, while other kids were picking up books and slowly but surely beginning to learn how to read I was struggling with the task before me. In first grade, I ended up being put in sort of one on one sessions with a separate teacher to help me get a hold of reading. It didn’t happen over night, but once I got a hang out it I always wanted to be reading something, maybe because I felt like I had so much to catch up on?

Regardless, ever since then reading has played a large roll in my life. I’m especially fond of writers that are extremely talented with being descriptive (i.e. Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, etc.) this allows their words and descriptions to be painted in my imagination and for me to clearly envision what they are showing. Sometimes, images from books will stay with me in my mind to a point where it begins to overlap in my artwork. I’ll begin sketching creatures that an author described in the pages of their novel, or a character from a comic book that I really enjoy. The character Batman has often found his way into a variety of my works, but typically my printmaking images.

I think the idea of Batman, this regular not super powered human who just happens to be extremely wealthy and able to buy all these gadgets, is what keeps him coming up in my mind. There’s a freshness there, seeing a “regular” guy going toe to toe with superheroes and super powered villains alike.

In my previous post, I mentioned an interview I had recently conducted with artist/illustrator Christopher Macdonald. Near the end of said interview when I was asking Chris for suggestions he was interested to see some of my work. All I had on me were two of my sketchbooks, each of which carried quit a few sketches of batman in them. Chris mad an interesting comment about how he really liked my drawings of Batman, because it felt like I was questioning this idea of what is a superhero and what makes a superhero, making the images less like fan art that you might find on a deviantART page and more like something to built off of for a piece of “fine-art”.