Rooseveldt

Painting and drawing

I graduated with an art major in 2005, and i've drawn all my life. My main interests tend to be gothic, fantasy, or comic-style art. Personally, i find comic art just as legitimate as "fine art", and a lot of my work reflects that, or so i'm told. This wasn't always popular with my professors. Nonetheless i owe them a great deal, i was very lucky to have the professors i did when i was in college. I also write a lot, and i'm working on a series of stories that take place in an ever-expanding setting, that incorporates a wide range of subject matter. As far as my art goes, the ideas within are what matter to me most, and i would say that most of my art exists only to complement those ideas.

I prefer traditional media, and i do the best i can with the materials i can afford. A professor once told me that as young artists, you are probably making no profit from your art. Therefore you must do everything you can to minimize your art expenses. Use anything, the cheapest crap you can find, and make great art with it. Find it, beg for it, steal it if you have to. That rubbed off on me, and i'll freely admit that the majority of my recent work is done with cheap crappy craft paint. But i will work with any paint and brush i can find generally.

Maybe i'm a part of the rapidly deteriorating old school, but i'm not fond of using digital media, though i can appreciate its quality. I practice when i can with the limited software and tablet i possess. But the feeling of a real brush/pencil/pen in my hand is something i can never abandon. The same professor i mentioned above agreed with me, saying, "man, just give me a piece of wood to work with, something real in my hand."


A note to my customers:

I'm still in the process of trying to get decent photographs or scans of my larger work to post here, so hopefully i can make this gallery more complete soon. There's a great deal of more traditional work that is large and unrepresented here; things that have been shown in galleries in town you would be familiar with, and crappy iphone pics just don't suffice. I know that some of my customer's will see this and be surprised by some of the subject matter. But its just what i do. Many of these pictures were either completed or at least sketched up to 11 years ago, and only recently have i properly finished them off with color. I like to revive old sketches and turn them into something i can be proud of.


Writing

My #1 interest in life is mythology. Since i was young, ancient Greek and Norse mythology fascinated me. If i had to define my work concisely, i would say that most of it is my personal interpretation of mythological figures, and my own unique ideas thrown into the mix with them. My desire to describe and illustrate my interpretation of the cosmos is my primary focus.

Since 2005, i have been writing about a setting that does just that, capture my vision of the cosmos and all that dwell within it. Because of this, it has expanded farther than i ever anticipated. Maybe even larger than i can handle. In short, i have created my idea of how all things spiritual or mysterious relate to humans. It is divided into two parts, one is a more down to earth series of stories of the supernatural affecting normal people. They are mostly horror/mystery type stories. The X-Files, Supernatural, Buffy come to mind.

The other half is more of a cosmic scale, where i have thought up an all encompassing, ephemeral and unseen "spirit world", wherein all the deities that have ever been worshipped have their own place within, along with their related mythos. Not necessarily in harmony, but existing together as a greater whole. I have taken bits and pieces of every religion and glued them together to form my own vision of the cosmos. I myself am agnostic, and take interest in every religion and their mythos without holding any as my own. For the purpose of my setting, i have assumed that all cultures and their religions are a little bit correct and a little bit mistaken at the same time. Like pieces of a puzzle. Every group had a piece of the truth amidst misconceptions and fiction. I include my own personal fictional (?) creations to represent the grey area in between. Put all those pieces together, and you have a clearer picture of the spiritual facet of the universe. (rather multiverse.) I hope to publish it all before i die...we shall see.




Rooseveldt