Hope And Change (AKA The Audacity Of Art)

I recently stumbled upon this artist named Travis Louie. His paintings of Victorian era monsters and chimeras are indelibly haunting. The style of those old, hazy portraits which he draws upon pulls you in like a living fog, and you find yourself wading deeper into melancholy. You recognize that as alive as you are this very moment, one day you too will be a thing left to a distant past; a photograph, a DVD collection, a dusty blog stumbled upon by a Tom Sawyer and a Huck Finn who marvel at it for a few moments until a frog croaks and their chase of life and wonder begins again.

I'm impressed at how quickly the artist is able to make you see past the monsters and through to the life within them. Like us, even monsters need to remember. Like us, even monsters want to stop time. Like us, even monsters have an innate and subconscious understanding that memory is not an inert thing like a photograph or a letter; memory is an act of creation. But there are times where we need that memorabilia. To call upon it as a guide when we've gotten turned around in the back roads we've traveled thousands of times, catching frogs, playing make believe.

I would love to see these works in person because it's almost hard to believe they are actual paintings and not digital images.

Please visit his website here.