Technarcissism Part I
24”x30”
Acrylic on canvas
2015
This painting is of a robot in his artist's studio. Two of his pieces are painted replicas of pieces I've made myself (Angel on my Shoulder and Create Outside the Box). This is a sister piece to Technarcissism Part A. With its sister piece, these works play with the perception between two and three-dimensional media.
Angel on my Shoulder
34”x44”
Acrylic on canvas
2014
Bound 2 be Kitsch
36”x48”
Acrylic on canvas
2014
Following the release of Kanye West's "Bound 2" song in 2014, I made a parody portrait of the rapper. I defined kitsch as art that is so terrible and cheesy that its pure audacity is actually enjoyable. This is also how I felt about Kanye West's new song "Bound 2" so I painted this portrait of him as a modern sort of kitsch.
Forgotten Souls
36”x60”
Acrylic on canvas
2016
This piece is a self portrait but also a more realistic portrayal of a yamask, which is a Pokémon. In the lore of the games, yamasks are ghosts of dead people and the mask that they carry is its face from when it was alive. It's pretty dark and creepy, especially for a children's game so I'm super into it. You can check out the process for making this piece .
Jeff Leavitt
Things I Wish Existed
Before I made all the pieces for my Granted exhibition I experimented a little with different shaped canvases. So I had this one pentagonal canvas just sitting around for a while unpainted but December 2017 decided to paint the cartoon character Steven Universe on it since the shape of the canvas kinda resembles the gem Steven has on his belly in the show.
I did a second 30-day-challenge during my freshman year of college. I made a Pokémon that I had used in the games I'd played out of Sculpey and took (shitty) pictures of them everyday and put them on facebook. A while later I decided to keep going and made some more.
and Megatron the Lotad
Here are some nicer pictures of a few of the better ones:
Some concept art for a Pokémon print I made in my printmaking class:
Wanted to give some paint markers I was given a try so I drew this sub-par pic of a Pyukumuku (it's a Pokémon, in case you're not sensing the theme here).
So I made the discovery, that by random happenstance, the 30-day-challenge Pokémon I made happened to be about the same scale as the Things Between Walls Sage Arts Center model I made for my senior project (Check out the rest of that show ). This was a pretty exciting realization for me.
Yes, I'm into other nerdy things besides Pokémon. This is a little Sculpey sculpture I made of an alien race from the 1980's Transformers cartoon called a Quintesson. Seemed like it'd be a fun thing to make.
As part of a space-themed installation project in my painting class in college, I made this canvas TARDIS for Doctor Who as well.
This is a drawing I made of Hiram McDaniels, a character from the Welcome to Nightvale podcast. The character is described as a literal 5-headed dragon (I drew this before it was revealed what the different heads' colors were). Just for fun, for a few years at school whenever student government elections were being held I would hang up a bunch of posters with this image saying "Vote Hiram McDaniels" because the character was running for office in the podcast narrative.
In my intro sculpture class freshman year of college, I decided to make a full (ish) scale Dalek (from Doctor Who) out of cardboard. I put a battery powered LED light in its eye and used those plastic domes for soft drinks for the orbs on its side (that made for a very awkward request from Starbucks). It also had desk chair wheels underneath it so it could roll and the head was on a swivel to allow it to rotate. It was a fun project.
Bored in one of my classes, I drew this Godzilla-Hello Kitty hybrid, 'cause you know, why not?
