HAZLINGER: Artist Statement 2022
Fresh air fills your lungs as you step towards the valley. Hills of every color imaginable overwhelm your vision, a sparkling lake just ahead. But, something is amiss. The sun does not seem to strike the hills as it should. You are a Lone Traveler on the Western Landscape.
I am a digital and traditional artist proficient in drawing and painting, on canvas, paper, and in Krita and Photoshop with a digital tablet. My interdisciplinary work with computer science creates sequential art from my static work. My passions lie with character design of people and creatures, as well as life drawings. In developing a more sophisticated taste for aesthetics, I have been able to portray concepts that excite me. Part of my practice is writing. My collaborator and I have been writing together for years, in which we place our original characters in alternate universes of fantasy and historical fiction. This is my main method of characterization, as I breathe life into these concepts with illustration.
“A Lone Traveler on the Western Landscape” is the first part of my series relating to our old western alternate universe, completed on July 11, 2020. It features my original character Asami in the western United States in 1848, using a variety of natural photo references from both California and Arizona deserts, painted digitally on my display tablet. It is aesthetically beautiful, but invokes a feeling of isolation and loneliness as Asami looks over the vast region. The unnatural lighting based upon the position of the sun foreshadows the murderous tragedy that is to come for Asami, the assassin-turned-blacksmith.
“Sunset at the (Magic) Little Old West Town,” in terms of the western story, is chronologically after the events of “A Lone Traveler…”. I completed it nearly a year later, on April 20, 2021. It is a two point perspective of the little town my collaborator and I built with our original characters, featuring several buildings and one church based on a Catholic cathedral in San Francisco. There is a sense of peace created with the warm colors and united calm among the front characters. You are able to hear the guitarist’s song, his friends peacefully humming along. However, underlying conflict is implied by the right side character’s shading and dismal expressions, signifying the loss of something that meant the world to them. The painting is meant to capture a moment in time that all of the characters cherish as their last before violent chaos ensues, reflecting the horrors of the glorified old west.
Most of my work involves the ambivalence of life and fantasy, as portrayed through characterization. As you are enveloped in the guitarist’s lovely song, yet feel a pang of sorrow in your stomach, you realize that life is gilded in a shell of glory, shielding its true ambivalence.
