ARTIST STATEMENT

My November piece, “Trainwreck”, was essentially an idea I thought of while listening to music on the train. The idea of it was to turn a train, a commonly used form of transpiration, into a form of horror with low poly/ pixel art characters. I created this because I wanted to turn the many ideas, no matter how wild they sounded, into a proper piece that was planned out and made on Blender. 

This idea was shown through my storyboard, which was short but showed the clear idea of Anta and mc 2’s tense relationship. Anta is a regular person, their eerie personality was shown through the scythe on their back and the theater mask they’re wearing. 

The look inspiration for this piece is low poly art. There are a lot of old games I looked at through the creation of this piece, such as Jet Set Radio, GTA Andreas, Sengoku Turb, Dance Dance Revolution, Slap Happy Rhythm Busters, early Sonic games, etc. The art style always left me in a state of pixelated, low poly goodness state of happiness. It’s always been so interesting to see how game developers had to simplify character models to be able to fit them on a simple CD, ready for early gaming systems to play. Besides games, there were a lot of artists that use those low poly, pixel art themes/ aesthetics today, and they make their work into a pretty 90’s-00’s gaming dream. Those artists include (all can be found on Instagram or Twiiter), @kyu_fu, @lordstingray, @alec.fbx, @mogobogo, @won3d, @monyy2004, @brwler, @world4jack, and many others I’ve yet to discover. Without artists like them, I wouldn’t know the world of early gaming, and the art and aesthetic of low poly art wouldn’t even be an inspiration in my work. 

The reason I created this work was that I wanted to have fun. I wanted to dive into an art style I never truly knew before, I wanted to make something “old”, I just wanted to make a piece that represented the current things that inspire me. All I had was inspiration and openness to a project like this, and this is what I ended up with. 

In conclusion, this piece has been me experimenting with something new and different and trying to make something that aesthetically speaking, was something I could relate to and like fully. I dipped my toes into waters I never thought I could be in and ended with a simple art piece that has more meaning on it than’s under the surface.