How did you develop your style, themes, and visual language?

I think I had some of it already in college because we would do projects. I would incorporate high-contrast, wild-looking illustrations that looked like they were going to escape off the page and eat something. My visual style I brought into every project, whether it warranted it or not. I ended up just always doing what I wanted.

When I was working a really boring job, I made so many doodles and researched different cultures’ mythology. Every culture has really beautiful, specific, interesting stories that were really inspiring to me. Reading about them and their mythology gave me a lot of creative fuel to construct my own narratives and mythologies. That started me down the path I’m on now artistically and my visual language.

My doodles have always been like a library for me to reference. Whenever I ask, “What should I put here?” or “I’m missing this thing,” I’ll go back and look at my doodles and see there’s a ton of different things I could use. It’s kind of like a repository: “Oh, here’s how I drew trees in one hundred different ways” or “Here’s hands in different ways,” and I can just pick one.

When I was trying to figure out my visual style, an exercise my roommate recommended was writing down artists that you want to be like and bullet points about what specifically they do that you like. If you like their use of contrast, or if you like how stylized their people are. Getting as granular as possible was really good for me.

“Adventurous,” “psychedelic,” and “bold” are words I’ve seen used to describe your work. How would you describe your style? I would say it’s even spiritual or mystical.

Yeah, mystical for sure. Mystical and magical.

I could see how surrealism and maybe even magical-realism elements are in it.

You honestly said it better than I could. I guess the way I think about the world is kind of in a magical-realism way. I just imagine things happening . . . I have an idea that I come back to a lot whenever I see streetlamps. I always imagined creatures that are attracted to and just swirling around them like moths. It’s not a totally separate reality, but it’s sort of magical-realism elements that are incorporated into our world. That comes out in my work. I’m also really inspired by psychedelic music posters from the ’70s, which I think really comes through.

“Vibrant” would be a word that I would use. And “energetic”: I always want there to be energy, like things exploding out of other things. I want people to be able to see a lot of movement, like it can’t be contained. And “spiritual,” “magical,” maybe “haunting.” Another word I would use is “uncanny. Since I was a kid, I’ve always really been inspired by things that freaked me out. I can’t figure out why. That’s probably the thing that I’m always striving toward making and showing.

Who and what are your sources of inspiration?

After college, at my first boring job, a woman had just gotten back from Ireland and was talking everybody’s ear off about it. I actually was super interested in hearing all about it. She had seen the Book of Kells, which is an illuminated manuscript. She was talking about the monks and how they drew in the margins when they were bored and drew these little tiny creatures that you can’t really see except with a magnifying glass, which is so cool. I started researching it in all my free time and then looking at illuminated manuscripts, ancient holy-book illustrations from different cultures, and textiles. Weirdly, the most boring job I ever had, that had nothing to do with art, was the thing that jump-started me into being an artist.

I got a lot visually from the book Where the Wild Things Are and was so inspired by that and Dr. Seuss. I just loved illustrations and children’s books. I love Richard Scarry. When I first started wanting to make art, I was always thinking about vignettes and seeing into people’s worlds that you’re not supposed to be seeing [laughs].

I look at textiles from other cultures. And I look at Pinterest a lot. I think, at this point, I’ve pinned so many things that Pinterest just knows what I like. I have, like, forty different boards.

Everybody likes this place, but I really love Printed Matter. I used to work next to it in Chelsea. I would always go in there and just vibe out. It’s just honestly more inspiring sometimes for me to go in there than a museum because I can touch the pages and look as close as I want and just pull things out. It’s so much fun.

How do you get out of a creative rut?

My mom got me this tiny pocket-size notebook. I had a party recently where I did this: I brought that and just passed it around, forced everyone at the party to draw something on a page. If there’s any awkwardness or weirdness, that goes away because you’re all focusing on this other thing that’s foreign to you. And you see a side of everybody that you have never seen. I think everybody has art in them, and everybody is an artist. It’s whether they’ve cultivated it or not. It’s really inspiring for me to see what comes out when people are forced to make something on the spot.

Another thing that helps me get out of a creative rut is any kind of exercise. I’ve had a lot of my creative ideas while running or while working out in some way.

Weed helps a lot, which I know is a cliché, but I think it’s so hard not to get in your own way. Any- thing that helps you not think so much is good. That’s why I love to iterate with ink and a brush, because it gives you less control, and you can’t erase it. It just helps me get into a creative flow state where I’m doing more instead of thinking. A lot of my drawings come from an image I’ve drawn when I’m not thinking.

Reading helps a lot too. One of my favorite creative books that has given me the most ideas and just made me into my creative self is Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I recommend it to everybody I know. Another book specifically that is so inspiring to me is The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington. I love her as an artist. She is the queen of mystical art. Her work as an author is like looking at one of her paintings, but for me it’s more inspiring. It tells a story behind her work. It’s not like you can connect the stories to any of the paintings, but the way she writes is so visual.