My name is Evan Pierce Blumer, an aspiring comic book writer and artist from New Jersey. Growing up, to distract myself from family troubles, I would escape into the comic worlds of Marvel and DC. This escapism inspired me from a very young age to want to make my own comics. Not only did I love the great world building and characters, but I also loved the art styles and designs of the characters and their universes as well. I was in awe of the artwork of Kevin Eastman, Humberto Ramos, Jim Lee, Jack Kirby, and Matt Frank. Jack Kirby in particular is a big inspiration to this day. His cosmic character designs, unique world building, and overarching sense of hope in his stories is something that has always stayed near and dear to my heart. From that, I wanted to be able to create my own worlds and write and draw the kind of stories that saved my life when I was little.
When I create my art, I want people to be able to engage with it from different kind of angles. Not only do I want people to be able to appreciate the craftsmanship of my work, but I want them to notice the message that I wish to bring into it as well. In this day and age, it's rather hard not to have some kind of political undertones in your work. Very recently, I've been starting to do the same. A big belief of mine is that the people in power don't really care what happens to us, the common people. The only ones that are going to look out for us is, well, us. I want my work to start incorporating that more. I want my work to have heart and my heart to have gravity.
ON PHOTOGRAPHY
"What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire."
"Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are."
These two quotes from Susan Sontag's article 'On Photography' really stuck out to me because to me, they really capture the essence of what makes photography such an interesting medium. I love how the first quote says that they're 'pieces' of the world, pieces that you want to capture at the right time and convey the meaning or feeling that you want to pull out of them. You can't manipulate a photograph (at least while you're initially making it- we've got Photoshop now!) as much as you can manipulate a painting or a drawing, but to still be able to make something so striking is incredible. What you can manipulate, however, is the world in which you're trying to capture in your photograph. Which leads me to the second quote, which discusses how photographs can be as much of an artist's vision of the world as any other medium of art can be. Once you mold the world to your vision and cast it within your photograph, that is art incarnate. You can argue that every medium of art has some form of world molding, but it couldn't be more true to photography. Last semester, I attended an art exhibit that was composed of photography from many different local Latino and Hispanic artists. Seeing their work and being able to see what they wanted the world to see in their work was so engaging, and since then I've been considering getting into photography itself. That, my friends, is art.
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