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Featured Artist

Isaac Roller 

Drawing inspiration from the strange and bizarre, from comic books and Japanese monster movies to artworks by Francisco de Goya and Hieronymus Bosch, Isaac Roller makes tightly controlled but energetic artworks in pen, ink, and watercolor. He's exhibited on both coasts, had his work published online and studied brush painting in Japan. His largest work to date is 32 feet long. 

Gallery

http://isaac-roller.com

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This first series of work are a set of 3 Illustrations from Isaac's senior thesis project, a 32 ft scroll which chronicle the changing of relationships between man, animal, the environment and the self. Read right to left, it explores many different thematic elements through it's own visual narrative,  which uses size and placement, fluid groupings of transforming figures and repeated imagery to lend weight and significance to its story and characters. The figures depicted move through and transmogrify into both their environment and each other, turning from human to animal to vegetable and joining with the landscape itself.

Inspirations

  • Francisco de Goya,

  • Heironymus Bosch,

  • Remedios Varo

  • Underground Comix (Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, etc.)

  • , Wangechi Mutu

In Persian mythology, maleficent spirits – djinnis– are captured in magic containers, represented in this project by the constructions of wood and metal onto which the drawings are mounted. The creatures drawn on the paper are the manifestations of ideas which I consider to be harmful. The cities on their heads represent the logical conclusion of those ideas, the world-view necessary to consider those ideas to be true. Many of the pieces explore how those ideas are spread. For example, the first piece shows how ideas pass from one generation to the next, often mutating into something worse. The second shows a magician, or another person with undue influence impressing his ideas on a weaker person. The last depicts nine separate groups of people, each caught in their own misconceived world-views, together making up a hierarchical society.

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