Art Mediums: collages of toner printed paper, magazine, and PVC transparency

The devil finds work in idle hands. Through shape, texture, tone, and color, I try to keep my hands moving with the stroke of a pencil; the careful precision of cutting and sensitive positioning of collage pieces just before they’re glued down; the physical touch, pressure, and interaction with mechanically driven visual objects. I make art that reflects the beautiful and strange, capturing a sense of wonder, of focus, of curiosity, all while navigating my own queerness and subverting masculine imagery with a certain femininity and gender nonconformity.

In addition to watercolor, I use various types of paper stock and printed ephemera including old boxes, books and magazine clippings, security envelopes, and product packaging—stuff that we bring into our homes and discard every single day. I use thrifted office and art supplies, drafting instruments and pre-computer graphic arts tools, stickers and labels, and a toner printer/scanner to explore various hands-on processes that were used before computers. My work is inspired by experimental art movements and styles that broke standard rules, a fusion of Dada and Surrealism with a dash of Cubism and Bauhaus.

Graphic designers and artists of the early ’80s created the visual aesthetic that accompanied my favorite punk and post-punk music, finding processes that worked for them, including tracing paper and transparencies used to build layers and color filters into high contrast work. I internalized a desire to make work that reflects on my own past and experiences, channeling the work of those music designers. The past two years have been a blur of creative explosion in a small, confined space, and my work represents that. I have discovered an unending desire to expand my know-how of old-fashioned techniques, never settling for one particular style.

Like an old song for new ears, my work is a remix and recontextualization of things I’ve learned from various places: books, peers, the art at galleries and museums, album covers in my record collection, graphics on a skateboard, and the many subcultures I’ve been involved with during my life. I never went to art school but I found art everywhere I looked.

“My earliest memory of art is a painting my great grandfather (an illustrator) made in the 1920s on the wall of my grandparent’s house, along with a framed, mounted jigsaw puzzle of American Gothic (my grandparents were avid puzzlers). My father was a mechanical engineer, so I was always surrounded by architectural blueprints. I grew up in a rural hippie community and one of our family friends was a silkscreen artist who made beautiful screen-printed landscapes of our area that my parents brought into our home. All my life I've been a music collector and skateboarder. I've always loved the visual components of skateboarding, from skateboard artwork to the photos and advertisements in magazines. Album art is one of the purest mediums, adding a visual identity to the music.”

“These days, you can do most things in photoshop or illustrator. I find it more enjoyable using materials with textural qualities, and a variety of physical, hand-crafted processes of primitive graphic design that computer programs can only mimic and simplify. It's a slower process, much less forgiving, and way more tedious. But it's fun to figure out the old-school way.”

Travis Ritter

Bella Ormseth

Junko Yamamoto