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 rehab orphaned baby squirrels, dance with devil sticks, clean up my local bus stops, and ride at DJ bike raves. 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 the right thing,
And 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 game also wrote instructive essays that helped my understanding of "low resolution" art.
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 we 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; and Developmental Psychology: Childhood and Adolescence, textbook by David R. Shaffer and Katherine Kipp (I read the eighth edition).
In exhibiting my art, especially my political art, I wish to raise a humane and critical consciousness in anyone who views them. I am also publishing here selected personal works and essays, of relevance to those wishing to understand my artistic psychology.
I’ll also be posting my Cookbook here because I’m sick and tired of trying to look up a recipe online, and having to scroll down pages of filler text and advertisement just to get to a damned ingredient list, let alone the cooking directions. I mean, doesn’t that piss you off, too? If you ever wanted to know what I put in my Crock-Pot or Ninja Foodi, there you go.
I’m fairly active on the Reject Convenience forum and the MelonLand 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 are immaculate. 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.
Email: hello@thisdomain.art
(If you don’t get it then I can’t help you)
