14 | New Paintings & a Zine
Recent paintings and a preview of the "Character Arc" zine dropping in April 2025.
Painting (March 2025)
Yo! Welcome to the latest +Process newsletter by Nonstndrd Creative. This time around I’m going to be sharing some recent fine art work and providing a short preview of a zine I’m publishing next month.
Artistically, this year has been off to a good start. My approach to painting and fine art is a little tortured, characterized by fits of high production followed by weeks of inaction. It’s interesting watching how it all evolves, how one decision made while creating a new painting can shift the direction my overall body of work is heading in. It’s a process that revels in its inefficiency, highlighting the nonlinear nature of the creative workflow. In the past five years, I’ve been focused on an aesthetic consolidation that spans the different mediums I work in. Each discipline contains breadcrumbs that hint at my evolving stylistic philosophy. My paintings are where it all comes together while simultaneously being the point of origin.
The first piece that I finished this year is titled, “01, 2015”.
It’s a mixed media painting, using a combination of acrylic paint and marker on 11”x14” illustration board. The nonfigurative, abstract composition is the latest piece in my continued exploration of the relationship between color, shape, and space. This style serves as the base for most of my creative output, from collages to my design practice and is incorporated into my recent portraits and illustrations.
My most recent full sized painting (16” x 20”) evolved slowly over the course of 5 months or so.
"Visual Depth (2025)" was initially planned as a traditional painting but once I started it and blocked out some of the major elements, I got stuck. Maybe a better way to state it is that I became uninspired. It happens, sometimes a piece can start out really strong only to lose steam. I’ve learned to be patient with the process and so I let it sit for a while. It took longer than I anticipated to return to it but I resumed work with fresh eyes. I used paint markers to apply detail and that small shift took things in an entirely different direction. It became a bridge between my ink drawings and the completely abstract portraits I’ve been creating recently.
This painting is my most successful combination of those two mediums/approaches and I think it will have an influence on the work I make in the near future. I’m the type of artist that loves to go down these type of stylistic rabbit holes. We’ll see where this one leads to but it has definitely unlocked some interesting ideas.
Character Arc (2025)
I have a new zine coming out next month. While working on my upcoming mini art book, “Rap Dreams” (due out late summer), I got the urge to publish a compilation of my drawings from the past decade. The result is titled "Character Arc (Select Drawings from 2012-2023)" and it features 30 of my favorite illustrations from those years. I’ve always loved black and white ink drawings, something about creating within those constraints brings something special out of me. I have always drawn faces inspired by the people I see in the streets. On top of that, the majority of my characters are Black because I have always been aware of the scarcity of representation in the art/illustration space. In fact, on of my most popular zines from the previous decade is titled “BLKPPL” for that exact reason.
One of the coolest things I realized when placing these drawings together was seeing my creative progression over time visualized. The drawings aren’t in strict chronological order but are grouped according to era. The craziest thing is that the first few date back to before my first child was born, reminding me of a world and version of myself that I hardly recognize now but are connected to my current self through the artwork in the zine. It was definitely a head trip.
