What’s with all the skulls?
Why do any of us do what we do?
Fun?
Survival?
To feel something?
I think a lot of what we do boils down to just wanting to be seen and heard. It’s an often-overlooked human need.
“Literally everything I make or do is me screaming to be loved.”
But how did I get here?
I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember.
In those early days, my parents were super supportive of this little habit of mine (and frankly, are now even more so), to the point of downright praising my abilities from a young age.
I think that positive reinforcement created quite the deep neural pathway in the ol’ grey matter, so much so that at any point in time over the past 32 years, at least a small part of me has always wanted to be an artist because I was seeking that type of validation in my life again.
Despite all my struggles with low self-worth, confidence, and imposter syndrome, somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain it was planted that maybe I could be good enough to do this professionally.
Plus it helps that I REALLY enjoy it! But aside from that, drawing always felt like a safe and acceptable way to express myself, especially as a man taught by society that I should never be vulnerable or show emotion.
I’ve always been a sensitive dude but never felt like it was ok to verbalize that, except through an art form. It’s a huge reason I gravitated so hard towards sad boy emo music. It was an example of sensitive men like me echoing the same emotions I have in powerful, ridiculously catchy ways.
Now in terms of style, I started drawing skulls and palm trees because I straight up loved it. I was emulating the likes of heroes like Sketchy Tank and Jamie Browne when I first really got back into doodling and began taking a career in art or design seriously.
It was from there that the unexpected happened. I started to see meaning in all the various low-brow tropical skulls in my sketchbook, and began unpacking why I started drawing them in the first place.
“Welcome home, shed your skin and expose your bones.”
For me, skeletons are two-fold.
On the one hand, they’re my favorite way to portray the simple idea of vulnerability; of showing the parts of ourselves and our inner worlds that we don’t often expose but need to let out. I love drawing a human being’s physical insides as a representation of our mental and emotional insides.
On the other hand, they allow me to represent anyone, simply because we all have a skeleton. Nowadays the art that ends up being my favorite is work that I can see myself in, that really speaks to me. Hopefully the use of skeletons is a way for anyone and everyone to see themselves and their experiences reflected.
To bring it somewhat full circle, I want my art to help people feel seen because that’s feeling I’ve been subconsciously chasing my whole life.
I also realized that pairing skulls and skeletons with tropical imagery was a way for me to articulate my overall outlook on life, the acceptance that you just can’t have the good without the bad. Oftentimes the bad, as awful as they are, can even make us that much more grateful for the good.
Now hopefully I don’t ever run out of ways to draw tropical skulls…
