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It is honestly quite amazing how one can look at your paintings and assume it is painted on canvas.
Thanks! That’s definitely what I’ve been working to achieve in my practice recently. I’ve put in quite a bit of time observing the works of traditional masters, studying subject matter, texture, lighting and so on, and then striving to achieve a similar emotion through digital means.

Part of me has always wanted to be an oil painter, just the idea and romanticism of being one. Maybe one day when carpal tunnel from clicking my mouse all day sets in…

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The Crying Lady 2021

Were you a traditional painter or were you always interested in the now of digital painting?
I studied graphic design and majored in illustration so I dabbled in digital painting then, but I never trained in traditional painting.

What I do now, though, isn’t quite digital painting — I know it’s often quite confusing. While the end product often resembles a painting, there is no actual painting involved. I work primarily on 3D software (Cinema4D, Redshift) to create my images, then process them with Photoshop.

It’s true that the immediacy of the digital medium can make the process more efficient, but more recently I’ve been fascinated with emulating the approach of traditional artists. I’ve incorporated sculpting in VR into my own process, modelling my subjects and forms from scratch where every stroke is intentional but also allows for some expressiveness and happy accidents.

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Personal Collection 2019

What is a recurring feature throughout your work?
I’m not sure, I’ve been moving through quite a few different explorative phases. But I guess all my work carries a sort of fascination with spaces, and exploring the creation of a mood and sense of atmosphere.

I feel like all these previous explorations are culminating in a series I’m working on now, led by my own personal memories — exploring how to depict pain and more difficult emotions in a way that is unexpected but no less vivid or visceral. I guess I’m curious if creating these personal scenes in this abstracted, distanced way has the potential to change the way I look at and process my own past experiences.

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Foreign Landscape 2020

Would it be right to say that your paintings are of a fantastical world? Is it perhaps one you wish to inhabit?
Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that. I was drawn to a lot of sci-fi growing up, through anime and films like Akira, Evangelion, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell… The list goes on. And I think I attempted to inhabit a lot of those worlds through my earlier work, maybe until about 2019.

More recently that has shifted to trying to get into the headspace of old-timey painters whose work I admire, if that counts as another kind of world I’ve been trying to inhabit?