Who Inspires Me?

I am creating this post as cumulative running collection of all the people who have inspired my work over the years. Most of the Artist on this list are Modern/ Contemporary Artists that are alive and still producing work. I have included descriptions and links to their social medias (if it applies) or other appropriate resources, so that you can support them as well. I hope this list inspires you to create the way it inspires me. The list is in no particular order, it is not a ranking, just a list of inspirational people i think you should look into.

Lets Begin!

Annie Frances Lee

An American artist born in 1935. She is known for her depiction of African-American everyday life. Her work is characterized by images without facial features. She used body language to show emotion and expression in her work.

Petra Collins

A Canadian and Hungarian artist, director of photography, fashion model and actress who rose to prominence in the early 2010s. Her photography is characterized by a feminine, dreamlike feel, informed in part by a female gaze approach.

Frida Kahlo

a celebrated Mexican painter known for her self-portraits, portraits, and works inspired by Mexican nature and artifacts. Her work, influenced by Mexican folk art, Surrealism, and Realism, often explored themes of identity, pain, and resilience.

Nadia Lee Cohen

A British photographer, filmmaker, and artist who works across fashion, music, and film. Her work is known for its surreal, saturated dreamscapes and campy cinematography, inspired by 1960s–1970s Americana and Britain.

Sasha Gordon

An American figurative painter who lives and works in New York City. She is known for hyper-realistic self-portraits set within surreal narratives and uncanny scenes.

Bruce Pennington

A British painter, best known for his science fiction and fantasy novel cover art.

Tamara de Lempika

A Polish painter who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes

George Grosz

A German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups.

Walter Ufer

an American artist based in Taos, New Mexico. His most notable work focuses on scenes of Native American life, particularly of the Pueblo Indians.

Allen Anderson

Born January 31, 1908 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.He moved to New York City in 1940 and painted covers for pulp magazine published by Ace Magazines, Fiction House, Harry Donenfeld, and Martin Goodman.

Rafael Desoto

Click the link for his biography. He is a pulp artist with an interesting backstory!

Lawrence Alma Tadema

A painter of mostly classical subjects, he became famous for his depictions of the luxury and decadence of the Roman Empire.

Henri Laurens

a French sculptor and illustrator.

Margeret Keane

an American artist known for her paintings of subjects with big eyes. She mainly painted women, children, or animals in oil or mixed media. The work achieved commercial success through inexpensive reproductions on prints, plates, and cups.

Charles White

Born in Chicago just after the First World War. Charles White’s Social Realism in his signature style of muted tones of black and white, sepia, and rich tonalities of reds and browns, had won critical notice in museums and galleries in the United States and abroad.

Mickalene Thomas

an African-American contemporary visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel.

Enrico Robusti

Born in Parma,Italy in 1956. After completing a classical studies diploma and a degree in Law, he dedicated himself to the study of the pictorial technique, with particular reference to the seventeenth century school of van Dick and Rubens.

James Jean

A Taiwanese-American artist based in Los Angeles who works in painting, printmaking, and drawing.His work is known for its intricate detail, rich colors, and surreal, fantastical style.

Logan Sylve

An American Artist Born in 1995, in New Orleans, LA. HE is a New York-based American contemporary painter and illustrator.

Oh De Loval

Polish-Thai artist Oh de Laval's vibrant, faux-naïf figurative paintings are beautiful yet macabre, unsettling yet humorous, and deviant yet honest

Honorable Mentions:

• John Waters

• Bob Fosse

• Hilma Af Klint

• Frank Dorrey

• Kahinde Wiley

If you made it to the end of the list, Your Awesome! Please feel free to explore the links to each attached artist. Thank you for checking out this post!

these f *cKers think we’re stupid

Why I Refer to the Metaverse in a Derogatory Way

A rant written by a raging Gen Z who's sick of all the rigamarole.

News articles should be a cultural staple. What happened to the paper boy? News ,social media , and short form content should not mix. People play their videos on high volume and create noise pollution. Videos are often loud, crude, and vulgar with brief reprieves of a cute animal videos. The negative mental health impacts lead to addictive behavior. There is too much information for a mind to process let alone comprehend the reality of what is being posted. The sheer speed and brevity of the content is lending to the current illiteracy crisis we are seeing in Gen Alpha. They cannot read because the American education system failed them during the pandemic and short form content replaced classrooms and scrambled their vulnerable developing minds. Bring back content you have to sit down and read for longer than five minutes. Bring back thoughtful conversation that does not spur from a minute clip of someone who’s just word vomiting . I want people to talk about topics that they thoroughly comprehend instead of the skimmed spark notes version. I crave depth and insightful feedback. I am sick of getting tiny snippets of stories that are totally disconnected and disjointed from it’s origins. Exclusively receiving highlight reels of peoples lives that are unchronological, irrelevant, and always so over the top. It is disorienting because your literally removing reality in exchange for fantasy. Authenticity is something people try to manufacture. Everything feels backwards and terrible. The quality in modern movie making has devolved to a AI puppet show with the characters narrating the story they are apart of and what was once an immersive escape feels like an insult to my intelligence. Even Reality TV has become so unconvincing and its very clear that everyone has been casted to play a role in a very scripted drama. They are telling the audience there intentions before the story even has the chance to evolve. Everything feels so backwards. The news feels performative rather than informative and Art feels informative rather than performative.

The Humanities have been hijacked by big tech. i blame Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bozo every single one of these tech CEOS that profit from our brain’s ability to pay attention. YouTube and Instagram are being sued under a class action lawsuit for it detrimental effects on youth mental health. For knowingly creating an addictive platform that has the ability to enact psychological harm on unsuspecting users. Its incredibly evil behavior.

Its even worse with AI. Not only are the environmental effects absolutely abysmal.With a large number of data centers being cancelled due to local communities pushing back against the initiative knowing the amount of harm the existing data centers have done to the communities the inhabit. Now, we are receiving WWIII updates from world leaders via Lego AI music videos. Yes, Iran is covering all bases from writing the American people an open letter to slowly dropping a series of AI videos that explain there actions during wartime but, its Lego Style. Why is the world so unserious? I hate the current state of affairs. Sending peace and liberation to Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, and the like from western colonial powers.

I am tired of saying Meta and friends are a double edge sword. Yes, there are benefits to social media but the benefits are as fleeting as the information we swipe away on our screens. Its not lasting and no where near substantial enough for the people to rely on this heavily on a means of connection and communication. Ultimately using these platforms is only playing into their hand, via providing your data, which includes your your feed, your posts, your likes, your swipe rate, the links you click and don’t click, your appearance, your location, and any other information you willingly give them including access to your photos. I wish more people saw it for the truest invasion of privacy that it is. Im past the point of thinking i can safely interact with these apps without some sort of repercussion.

Whether it be the mental toll , the threat of censorship, or the recent threat to weed out people who oppose the current administration or are anti-zionist. Things are getting real and social media is not a safe, sweet escape. Having my own domain website was my next best alternative to social media posting. Mind you, I am still hooked on social media. I love Youtube, and i had to ween myself off using Instagram on my phone to only using it at my laptop and i still relapse and download the app on my phone. I write this post from a place of desperately trying to detach myself. Its challenging because i became attached to social media at such a young age (11/12 years old). I truly am addicted to these platforms and it was created to be that way. It was made to tap into the human need of connection and if you stop using the site, you feel robbed of that connection. Its a feeling of FOMO x 10 like i wont know anything about the world if i don’t engage. If i don’t see a post about it on social media, it didn’t happen or i wont know whats happening. Social media hi-jacks my need for control. Scrolling through the world’s daily events satiaties that need in the worst way and they designed it to be this way. I know i am not alone in facing social media addiction and they know too. So many of theses CEO’s refuse to get high on there own supply meaning they know that their product is harmful and would not even dream of using their own platform for personal use.This is why I am starting a blog and trying different online creative outlets to not only detach but to replace and soothe my need for control in a more productive way.

Despite all my rage, I am just a rat in a cage being experimented on by big tech. That’s the thing i hate the most about of all of this is that knowing better does not always equal to doing better. The mind often moves faster than the hand.The awareness i have of the current state of things makes me want to be the outlier that the experimenters did not account for. I want to try something different with this tool. Refusing the endless thought loops and echo chambers laden with war propaganda being machine gunned at us is no easy feat. However, finding ways to resist that feels satisfying and will always benefit you more than the tech bro ceos. Even if one of them is benefiting from me having this website, the sheer (albeit temporary) ownership of my own domain has been extremely gratifying and i highly recommend it to those thinking about it.Boycotting malicious business is one of the greatest forms of passive resistance. We vote with our dollars and spending the least amount of money or time with these companies is a solid action plan to making them irrelevant. I believe internet sovereignty will be the new wave when the tech bros fall into obsolescence.

Some people think we’ll go back to using DVD's andVCR’s like in the early 2000’s but i just don’t see the world abandoning the internet without the power grid turning off for the rest of time. Our relationship to the internet will and has evolved quite rapidly and how people interact with it is up to them. My issue is not with the internet as whole. My issue is with social media and the toxic cesspool it is, My hope is that one day people will open up more to the idea of a less centralized version of social media. One that doesn’t rely on going to an app to interact with your online friends yet, maintains strong bonds that we, the people, fortify through supporting each others personal websites/ online creations rather than relying on algorithms to connect us to each other.

However, for now and until this day arrives, i use instagram and pinterest to promote and share my website. it’s not nor ever will be perfect but, taking action towards your ideal future is the best that can be done in this present moment. With your support i can make this future more real.

If you made it to the end of this article, THANK YOU!!! Please check out my “Blinkies Project” Blog Post to see my action plan toward a sovereign social media,

The “Blinkies” Project: Online Community without Metaverse B.S.

If you are coming here from my last post you will know that im planning something. A fun something, that i hope many people with join and help me flesh out fully.

Here is the pitch:

I made a community tab on my website and i want it to feature all of my artist friends website blinkies for online browsers to surf between our websites.

Now this would also require you, the participant, to do the same. Its kind of a follow for follow philosophy from the early Instagram days. If you have a website (you need a website to participate), i invite you to create a “ community page” of some sort that features people in your community.

If you are interested i implore you to go to one of the blinkie customization websites. Make yourself a standout blinkie. Go to my Contacts tab. Email me your blinkie, website, and proof of community tab with my blinkie featured and i will post your blinkie on my community tab,

Here are a few blinkie making websites i found that are easy to use.

https://www.dazzlejunction.com/blinkie-maker/

https://gerudovalley.net/blinkie_maker

https://myblinkie.holidaycomments.com/blinkies.php

Note: To make the blinkies work you must link your website to blinkie image, hope this helps!

To me this seems fairly straight forward and it been done numerous times before, so what the hell?! Why not give it a try???

If your interested please reach out via email. All of my contact information in under the contact tab if you have any questions or blinkie submissions, check out my new community tab :P

The Indie Web + My Genuine desire for online community outside of the metaverse

In 2024, I was having a tumultuous year to say the least that i have elaborated on further in a previous post. Throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks kind of year, However, through this experimentation i stumbled across an online community that now occupies a small corner of my mind that i am now sharing with you all in hopes that i can find a people willing to participate.

The community in question is the Indie Web. I would define the Indie Web as cohort of individuals who are skilled in HTML, CSS and other coding languages who have taken the initiative to preserve the best parts of the early 2000’s pre-my space era of online blogging and websites. Its a really fun rabbit hole to dive down once you enter the space its truly interactive, digital art, that inspires community. The websites people are capable of creating with code is impeccable. I tried learning HTML and CSS but when the time to actually build the website arrived i got cold sweaty palms. It was a project i kept postponing. Fast forward to the present, I found a website host that i enjoy working with and posting on and the rest is history.

The beautiful part about the indie web is not only its mystery but the way the bonds are woven between the websites. Blinkies, are vibrant stickers that have an embedded with a link to your website. They are flashy displays, almost personal advertisements for people to come look at your website. Every website will have a block of blinkies connecting web surfers to there community. Giving visibility to artists and website architects. It generates genuine traffic and its a fun and positive way to promote your community members.

The Indie Web is a creative bastion in a AI sea of slop. What I am proposing is to bring some of that energy into my own online community. I want to promote my friends work on my domain. Outside of the Zuckerburg’s Metaverse and i do not think that it is crazy to want that. Especially in times where AI CEO’S are considered war threats due to the amount of data they are abusing. Im over it, I want out, this is my out but i need people who equally want to participate for the sake of online community. Imagine people get an immersive, interactive experience with your work alone without being drowned out by the sheer noise of the algorithm. We are more powerful when we lift each other up. Connect and give exposure to like creative minds. If your still skeptical. Check out the r/indieweb reddit or start here https://heliocentric.zone/.

The Indie Web rabbit hole awaits you… Please return for my official Blinkies Pitch and Step by Step!

YouTube video about the indie web and Neocities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv223kX0SRg

2024: The Year The Void Ate Me + Vomited My Creations

12/22/2024

I once had a life, or rather

Life had me

I was one among many

Or at least I seemed to be

Well, I read an old quotation in a book just yesterday

Said, "gonna reap just what you sow

The debts you make you have to pay"

Can you get to that?

-”Can You Get To That” By Funkadelic 

Great song btw.

As the year comes to a screeching halt, my head is spinning from the whiplash and I'm tired of ruminating in my familiar void. This year marked many new beginnings as well as revisiting old creative ideas because I had nothing but time. Learning how to leverage my newly found freedom and actually trying my ideas, no matter how weird or random. 2024 got kickstarted when I got fired for the first time from a job that honestly altered my brain chemistry and how I view a 9-5. If it wasn't for all of the young and rich influencers on my timeline telling me working a 9 to 5 was lame, the horrible management, consistent under staffing, and my literal cancerous coworkers, i would have and should have quit months, nay weeks into the job but I am not mad anymore. Divine rejection redirected me into hustle culture or should i say catapulted me into a year full of trial and error. If the song lyrics at the beginning weren't foreshadowing enough, I will make a blatant preface and say 2024 was my year of karmic retribution for the slime I dealt in 2023. At least it felt that way. For the astrology freaks, this was my 12th house Profection year, which is a notably dark, hermetic, and introspective year and it felt extra rough because Saturn was transiting my fourth house of home, family, and private relationships. 

In 2024, I was in the house. Unemployed, living off of savings, trying random side hustles. It was cool for a while when I was in deep creation mode. I started the year with my first love, painting. I had been craving it while working at the job that I didn't like and finally had time to really devote myself. I used it to alchemize the pain of rejection and the overall hurt I felt at the time. I felt like I had finally taken the training wheels off,lost control, toppled over, and gotten my first big boo boo in the real working world. I cried and went home to my mama. I have no shame. To heal, I painted and created art and ended up making an etsy shop… it flopped. I had dreams of selling original paintings, prints and stickers. I announced it on my tiny socials and a few solid friends and family members purchased. It was a fun trial run but not worth the effort. Funny story, when I finally got an interview – my first and only interview of 2024 – for my local gas station. I mentioned my etsy shop  as some recent work I had been up to. The interviewer looked up my shop on the spot and all that came up were drop shipping floral shops. Mortified and embarrassed, I moved on from etsy.

During this time I was still actively applying and looking for work. I was also volunteering at my local art museum and putting together a tattoo portfolio. Try my luck. I thought I even landed a serious work from home gig that I ditched volunteering and the tattoo shop search for but it ended up being a scam 🫨 To make a month long story short, I got recruited, onboarded, and trained for an WFH online warehouse associate job and i ended up being the cog in a scammers fucked up machine. All for the promise of $3,000 at the end of the month,that obviously never came. I ended up reporting them to the FBI, and absolutely rued the day I ever received an email from them. 

My next great idea struck me while watching a Youtube Ad. “Make Passive Income with Amazon Royalties”. Curious, I clicked and was introduced to the world of online book publishing – specifically, Amazon Kindle Publishing.The ad was for a man selling an AI book writing service but I wasn't interested. Ai writing a book? That's actually ludacris. No, I was interested in the idea of choosing a topic to write about, finding a ghostwriting service, and publishing it for royalties. After researching further I found a stat that reported that 50 to 80% of books that have been published are ghostwritten. That was enough to convince me to look into it further. It was a situation where everyone else was doing it and making a bag, so I wanted to do it too and I did. That night I began researching different services, price comparing. At this point I still had some savings cushion but I was getting desperate. At this moment the thought of going back to a traditional 9 to 5 was out of the question. I was traumatized and burnt out. I chose to hustle because I'm young, creative, and worth the effort. I was tired of spending my money on things that only added clutter to my life (buying food) and didn't progress me forward (paying debt). So, I tried it as a last stitch effort, to use my money, invest it in a passion project, and end things with a bang. While researching, i got a phone call and i usually don't answer phone calls. I was especially hesitant because I didnt want to mess up my new work from home gig eye roll. However, this all occurred during the Aries Solar Eclipse transiting my 5th house of art,creativity, and sex, so caution was nowhere to be seen. I answer the phone and a friendly man responds on the other end saying he saw my submission on their website to write an astrology book. We discuss and I hang up the phone and my body is vibrating with excitement. My mom comes home not long after the phone call and I can't contain myself. I say, “mom, I think I just got a book deal.” We discussed it and the next day I was signing a contract to write a book about astrology. “Astrology Unveiled By Ryan Foxx” was published not long to long after that. After completing the book, I realized I kind of enjoy getting my ideas down on a page outside of my morning journal. I've never viewed myself as a writer because I never got great grades in English class. However, I have the urge to bombastically talk my shit about a variety of topics but, visual/audio mediums make me uncomfortable, to say the least. I'm not ugly and I'm not against the idea but if i did i would really have to wrestle with my fear of being seen/perceived. That's a topic for another day though. In reflection of this moment, I'm proud of myself for publishing a book but, in the future I would like to take a slower and more thoughtful approach to the undertaking. More funding was needed for the project and I was at the end of my rope. I couldn't afford to properly market it. I got decent first month sales just with my parents bragging about me but other than that not much.

After the book was done, my pockets were empty. Unfortunately for me, freedom is so much sweeter than a paycheck. Around the time I was reporting the scammers to the FBI (alot of these events overlap so forgive the timeline discrepancies).  My mom needed help cleaning out her closet. She had become so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of clothing and needed to purge some items. Specifically 3- 5 trash bags stuffed full with nice, lightly used clothes ready to be donated to the local thrift. At the time I was vexed and full of spite. I told my mom, “I'm gonna sell your clothes on Poshmark.” I saw an opportunity and I pounced on it. I took those clothes and learned how to make nice listings, take good photographs, create an inventory system, and some spreadsheets to keep me organized. I expanded to Ebay and Depop and ended up ditching Poshmark due to an unsavory review. I sold the clothes out of my closet, my sister's closet, my moms. I even tried thrifting but felt a little scummy about it. I tried this for the rest of the year, 6 months total. I made my first $1,000 and now I'm ready to quit. The hardest $1000 I've tried to scrape together. However, it saved me when the debt collectors started to call and it still helps me pay the bills.

I recollect my years worth of flops for you all to bring some personal catharsis and also hopefully provide a relatable tale on trying to survive this late stage capitalist hellscape we all find ourselves in. Being a young creative artist, living with my mom, absolutely in my flop era watching other people my age on social media seemingly living the dream and then turning around saying there just showing the highlights. My highlights this year were far from picture perfect and definitely not instagrammable . Despite my moaning and groaning, I learned how to romanticize my life a little bit more. Finding gratitude for all of the overflowing love and support from my inner circle. The pure delight I experience on a sunny day, smoking a joint, cloud gazing is unmatched. I realized my boyfriend is truly my person no matter what happens. My dogs are my closest and best companions and I started learning how to read tarot this year because the future is a little scary sometimes and I found that it helps with my anxiety.

 I feel like I ended the year worse than how I started financially but mentally I'm better-ish. Hell, I started this year with stretched ear lobes and now I'm wearing tiny huggie silver hoops. Things change and sometimes its not for better or worse, it's just different from what we already know. Reminding myself that all of the loss gives way for so much room for newness to come in. Also that newness isn’t always big,scary and bad, if it is I'm stronger and more resourceful now to handle the big, scary, and bad. I believe in myself now. Now i truly understand the value of money and that the number in my bank account does NOT equate to my worth as a human being. Its merely a means to an end, it always has been. Knowing what i can do with little inspires me for what ill be able to do with a little bit more. I can't wait to see what else I create in the future.Prayerfully, a steady income job that i don't hate <3

2026 Update: Manifested and claimed a steady income job that i don’t hate! Deleted the book<3 (Consider them “Special Editions”) I’m probably an ADHD baddie and that’s OK!

Melodramatic Whimsy

by Georgy Kurasov Art

Being an artist you will always get the question, “What does your art mean?” I’ve always struggled with an answer because at face value i really just enjoy drawing pretty ladies but, when i actually took some time to consider why i draw the things i draw, the phrase that came to mind is “Melodramatic Whimsy”.

What does this mean? Specifically, how do i relate it to my art and my motivations behind what i create. To deconstruct the phrase, melodramatic meaning an intense, exaggerated feeling that is almost theatrical in its expression. Whimsy meaning a light, surreal charm, with child like imagination. When you combine the two I imagine it’s like your emotions playing dress up. Its a stylized emotional overload that doesn’t take itself too seriously. That is how I would describe my relationship to my art.

I use my work as vehicle to channel my mood and my art style is a very stylized portraiture. This helps me to connect with emotions, visualize them, and alchemize into a beautiful piece of work. Essentially, using my art as means to tap into my inner child and stay connected with that youthful, creative, part of myself.

My work isn’t mystery laden, its not something you even have to read into that deeply, I want the viewer to be able to look at the work with a detached empathy. Ultimately, to appreciate the feeling that the work evoked and the technical skill that went into making it.

Not saying this is applicable to all of my pieces but the majority are simply pretty portraits i felt compelled to make because i love making things. I appreciate the artists from the Aesthetic Movement because sometimes its really just is about making art for arts sake. To create because it feels good to do so, not because your trying to make a big statement. Of course, there is a balance to strike between aesthetics and meaning. I just feel at this point in my artistic journey i lean toward the aesthetic appeal of art versus the storytelling aspect.

I felt compelled to write this blog post because my art doesn’t tell a story, its a fun house mirror and I’m tired of crafting B.S. stories for people to understand that. So if you’re someone who enjoys an explanation for why my art looks the way it does. This is your answer. I’ve been making art purely for the love of the game for my entire artistic journey(over a decade). No accolades, No large lump sums of money, no sponsors. Just me doing the thing i love because i love it. That’s what it will always be and if i reach critical acclaim it will be because my work is beautifully evocative no words necessary. I want to create ineffable works in my lifetime.