I am interested in observing, analyzing, and understanding the psychological disturbances provoked by a lifeless world of social rejection and the fixation on ephemeral consequence. The realization of what motivates the mind to change and deform might offer a glimpse at how to prevent the most heinous actions. These actions strike fear into society, but only the type of fear that looks at the societal consequences: What if I get caught? However the motive and desire is still there. It is easy for society to condemn what it does not understand, but does that eliminate the root of the problem? Society’s failure to properly analyze the root of the problem can ultimately lead to its own fatality.

Concerned with mortality and perceptions of the mentally ill, I hope to lead my audience through real life inspired scenarios of what happens when the human condition has reached its limit. My focus on panel-to-panel sequence, ambiguity in prose-to-imagery, and closure in-between panels stems from my longtime inspirations from graphic novelists whom are some of the greatest storytellers of the century. Writers like Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Will Eisner, and Neil Gaiman leave a lot of negative space to allow their viewers to fill in the gaps. Scott McCloud in his graphic novel/essay “Understanding Comics” refers to this phenomenon of filling in the gaps as closure. I aspire to further explore and harness the art of closure.

Adjacent to my drawings is my written prose that is vague and unimportant in describing the scene(s) depicted. My reasoning for this ambiguity stems from my fascination with semiotics and relating it to psychological disturbance. No matter how far from topic an idea may be, when placed side-by-side, two ambiguous ideas can create a relative bond between one another. We inevitably search for meaning between the two. I believe this is similar to the thought process of a schizophrenic—disorganized abstract ideas skewed between reception and perception. In the case of my work, the writing takes on a Romantic or idealized persona of psychological disturbance and places it into a modern context via real life experience juxtaposed with connotations of pop culture. This literary layer of my work is intended to emotively guide the viewer’s perception of the story, and provoke my own Romantic opinions towards receiving the outside world.