2020, Winfield Trail, Digital

You are at a train station. Or it used to be a train station. It does not seem like anybody will pick you up soon. There is a train on the tracks ahead, but it doesn't look like it has moved in years.

> Go North

Kunihoka is the first part of The Elsewalker, an art project I began in February of 2020. Each painting tells a story, and each painting tells a story when viewed in context. And each painting can be followed to the next painting in the series by finding the most interesting thing in the scene.

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Kunihoka was the first serious attempt I made to do a real illustration with the iPad Pro. I learned a lot in the process, from obvious things like "work in the highest resolution you can get without sacrificing too many layers" to less obvious lessons like "just because you have eighty brushes doesn't mean you need to use all of them in this picture". At this point, the idea of actually doing the Sequence (which would eventually become Elsewalker) was little more than a dangerous, heedless idea that pulsed in my brain, which I knew I could never actually DO! (Imagine how much time doing all those paintings would take.)

Influences-wise, this (along with several other paintings in the series) got a lot of its energy from the style of clip-art and computer graphics in the early to mid 90s. The glow pylons and the bird-fiends that crawl over them echo a memory I can no longer directly see.

I called it Kunihoka, which is sort of a turned-around and incorrect way to say "other country" in Japanese. That is not what this place is actually called, but people who pass through carelessly get things wrong.

The Hylozoist is a long-form digital project I began in February 2020. Each painting tells a story, and each painting tells another story when viewed in context. Also, each painting can be followed to the next painting in the series if you follow the most interesting thing in the scene.

To see more paintings from the project, click here.

, Art , The Hylozoist