Artist Focus: Esao Andrews

I ran across this guy the other day. I was just searching through Google and came across his name and really was caught up in his artwork. His work is very clean, and his subject matter is very fairytale-ish, but dark. Reminds me of a schizophrenic Alice in Wonderland.

You can check out his work at www.Esao.net.

Here's a few of my favorite pieces of his, and of course, they're copyrighted by the artist:

The Art World

For over 15 years now, I've been an artist. Rather, I should say that I've been able to draw ... sort of. When I was 12 or 13, I really liked drawing, mainly in pencil and pen-and-ink, and I had aspirations of illustrating comic books. (At the time, in the early 1990s, this was actually a pretty profitable career. Popular comic book artists were making damn fine money in the 90s boom, before the entire bottom fell out of the industry -- from which it has yet to really recover.)

However, once I turned 17 or so, music and writing really took over my creative interests, and drawing fell to the furthest back-burner and I barely picked up a drawing utensil for almost a decade. In the past year, my interest in illustrating has been somewhat rekindled. It started with pen-and-ink again, but has recently blossomed into painting. I've always been interested in painting, but assumed that with my semi-color-blindness (I have trouble discerning more subtle differences in color), that I would be a terrible painter. As a result, I never bothered actually trying it. I'm not typically a person who tries something without a reasonable expectation of succeeding.

After a bit of debate, and after finally coming to the realization that I had no desire to paint anything realistic anyway, I decided to give it a whirl. I picked up some acrylic paints from the art store and set to it. (Oil painting was where I really wanted to start, but it's enormously expensive when just starting out, so it was bypassed until I proved to myself that I'd be able to stick with it.) A handful of paintings later, things seem to be working out. I'm still feeling things out, and I'm unhappy that I have no discernible individual style yet, but that's to be expected for a beginner. We always start out imitating. Overall, I have more aptitude for painting than I had anticipated, though I'm no Picasso. Here's a few examples of what I've done so far:

"Blue Nightmare" - acrylic on paper


















"He Who Eats Fire" - acrylic and ink on paper


















"Not of the Earth" - acrylic on paper


















"Stalking the Dark" - acrylic on paper


















"The Toxic Dawn" - acrylic on paper


















So yeah, the output has been okay so far, though it's all just sort of blah. Blah subject matter, blah style, blah blah blah. With time, I'm sure I'll stumble upon a style that represents what I really want to be doing, and I'll think of imaginative, non-derivative things to paint. But, at least I think I know that I "can," which is pretty important I'm sure.

Going forward, if this is going to be a fairly serious hobby of mine, I'm going to need to arrange a more permanent workspace. Right now, I'm just painting on the kitchen table, no easel or anything. I've already gotten a few small splatters of paint on the table that my wife is understandably not pleased about. However, I also don't want to invest in an easel and take up more space in an already cramped room of our house if I'm ultimately going to give up on painting. That doesn't seem like it'll be the case so far, since I've been pretty excited about it all so far. We'll see before too long, though!