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photo courtesy Obi Kaufmann
I live and work in Oakland CA, I started Faultline Artspace in 2011 which is a metamorphosis of Mission Blue Studio, a panel making business that began in San Francisco in 2005. In addition to making art panels, Faultline Artspace also hosts gallery shows and figure drawing, produces screen prints, and rents studio space to artists. Faultlineis a 9000 sq ft loft space in an old furniture warehouse off the 880 freeway in East Oakland.
I work primarily in screen printing, painting, drawing, and digital mediums. I started screen printing in 2003 while attending Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). Screen printing is an interesting medium for me in the sense it allows stencils to be made in several ways, which include both hand drawn and digital images, and the combination of the two in one seamless stencil. That is to say it is often difficult or impossible to tell where the digital ends and the hand drawn begins. Although screen printing is over 1000 years old in its most primitive form, it really wasn’t until the 1960′s that it became popular as an art form, with Andy Warhol as its champion.
With digital art being a new and constantly evolving process, and with the inventions of new versions of traditional art supplies that can be incorporated into screen printing, I find that mixing screen printing with new and traditional art making techniques to be a fresh and exciting expression of ideas.
I work with several subject matter including landscapes, figures, skeletons, butterflies, and abstract patterns. Each has characteristics that are vividly unique, and the more I work with them the more the similarities seem to come out and overlap. I take an anatomical approach to each, with the visual rhythms of the subject being the focal point.