The Artist
Hey there.
- I’m Akihiko V. Charm, creating art under the name JINSBEK. I live in Northeast Minneapolis, Minnesota, and work Downtown as an office worker. In my free time, I resscue orphaned baby squirrels, dance with devil sticks, clean up my local bus stops, and ride at DJ bike raves with the Joyful Riders Club. I sometimes paint and make other art, too.
- I’m not a professional artist by any means, and have had no formal arts training aside from a poorly led Basic Design elective in my high school freshman year. I have two months of tertiary education at a community college, after which I dropped out due to boredom and depression. My favourite job was working as an apprentice butcher; but it didn’t pay enough in California, so I eventually quit and moved here.
- I was born in 1995 in the Philippines. I grew up drinking brown tapwater filtered through also browning socks, under a roof of corrugated scrap metal. As soon as you turned off the lights, you could hear the cockroaches rushing out of the walls; turning them back on parted the sea of scurrying insects and drove them back into the walls. Wearing shoes meant you were going to get your throat slit—my aunt survived such an experience, and still has the scar on her neck to this day. Those early experiences of everyday poverty were formative, and have cemented my appreciation for life today.
- As for my art, these days, almost all of my work is digital illustration, but I also love painting watercolours in my bullet journals, sculpting with Crayola Model Magic clay, and experimenting with music and sound effects in FL Studio. I’m not very good at the latter, but I pretend to be. I also love writing interactive fiction; my first ever job was as a scenario writer for a video game.
Do it right!
JINSBEK
I admire most the popular works of John Heartfield, German satirist against the Third Reich, and David King, graphic designer as historian and photojournalist.
As for colour, Craig Stitt’s landscape work on the original Spyro trilogy of games has been a seminal influence on me, and Stephen Quiller’s Color Choices: Making Sense Out of Color Theory immensely helped deepen my understanding of colour. Blake Reynolds of Auro and Jonathan Kim of Scott Pilgrim vs the World video game also wrote instructive essays that helped my understanding of "low resolution" art.
I found the Drawing Course by Charles Bargue very instructive on form, and this WIPO Magazine article on binocular perspective in art as rendered by Albert Sauteur, highly illuminating.
I primarily work with CLIP STUDIO PAINT, and Corel Painter. Occasionally, I’ll use Adobe Illustrator for typography and other graphic design elements. My favourite pixel art program is Microsoft Paint (did you know it has Layers now?!). Those are really the only four programs I use. My photography post-processing is primarily done in CSP.
I highly recommend the book Art as the Cognition of Life, a collection of selected essays by leading Soviet art critic Aleksandr Voronsky. Other works of art criticism that I recommend are: Shock of the New, the BBC documentary series by Robert Hughes; The Sky Between the Leaves, a collection of film reviews, essays, and interviews by David Walsh; How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, the recorded lecture series by Robert Greenberg.
In exhibiting my art, I wish to raise a humane and critical consciousness in anyone who views them. I am also publishing here poems, selected personal works, and essays; I have always been a wordsmith first, and an illustrator second.
This website is proudly hosted on Neocities.org. Go on and make your own website. It’s fun, and free.
I was fairly active on the MelonLand Internet forum. If you’re interested in hitting me up locally, I’d love to take you out to Earl Giles or the Broken Clock. The vibes of both are immaculate. I am also happy to go to any other joint, park, or library that suits you in the Twin Cities; though whatever is going on in St Paul must be at the top of their game.
I have some other online presences for my art but I don’t give a crap about them, really. Here’s my Facebook and Instagram ; my Twitter/X is inactive. I don’t have any interest in alternative microblogging platforms like Bluesky or Mastodon, even if they’re decentralised. I used to have a DeviantArt, but I don’t consent to my art being scraped for generative imagery.
Email: hello@jinsbek.art
Feel free to become digital penpals. Seriously.
