Today we’d like to introduce you to Tyler Young.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I think a lot of my artistic thinking stems from my overall academic and critical thinking ability. For most of my life, I was a self-taught artist. I learned most aspects of drawing and painting from my own intuition. This started in elementary school when my older brother would create comic strips with his friends and refuse to let me join in since I was not yet capable enough to contribute. From then on, my mission when creating art was self-improvement. I always asked myself, “How do I make my cartoonish drawings more real? More three dimensional?” From there I began studying human figures, perspective, and other basic building blocks of two-dimensional art on my own.
Especially when I started succeeding in subject areas of math and science, subjects that really pushed one’s ability to utilize their critical thinking and cognitive abilities, I wanted to find ways to translate that kind of thinking into my art. For a while, I felt this was a dead end since I was looking for some personalized depiction of the things I was studying in calculus or my physics classes and that was going nowhere.
Eventually, I applied my analytical thinking that stems from my academic side and used it in my artistic process. In high school, I really wanted to not only continually learn how to create better art, but more importantly become better at learning. With the dozens of hours, I devoted every week to my artwork, I couldn’t just keep producing a large number of works and expect improvement. I needed to continually ask myself, how do I become a better artist?
At this time I started abstracting my subject, being more intense colors and looser brushstrokes, as a need to create a more personal reaction to my subject I am depicting. This was a way to properly respond to the things I was painting, and paint a better representation of my feelings towards my subject rather than the literal object itself. In my A.P art class, I learned about cubism, which shattered my understanding of art completely. I found a way of creating that destroys basic understandings of drawing and found a purified way of expression.
Last school year I started my first year at San Diego State University originally studying in studio arts. This past year proved to be way more influential and amazing than I could have ever expected. After taking a couple sculpture classes I switched my major to sculpture since I felt a need to create something outside the boundaries of a two-dimensional space. As of now, I plan on trying to be a professional artist selling my work. I would also love to work as any form of educator since I love spreading my love for learning to other people.
Please tell us about your art.
My work in the past year has been the study of movement and expression through gestural abstraction. I try to find meaning through powerful applications of paint onto a canvas or the autonomous movement of lines. I’ve generally been painting figures but have recently been moving towards landscapes. However, the subject matter of the work seems to be more and more irrelevant for my creative process, because it is used rather as a reference point to start off my expression.
Only recently have I shifted my focus into a more sculptural perspective. It is hard to say as of now the meaning or concentration of my three-dimensional work, but I have been fascinated with studying the relationship between materials and found objects and creating some sort of harmonious entity.
In the end, I want to attempt to create a linear verse that closely parallels common verbal communication. I want my audience to see my movements and my expressive brushstrokes as a narrative, that gives a back and forth relationship between the viewer and the work itself. My work challenges the perception of the viewer, as I attempt to forcibly engage the viewer into a discussion of the overall relevance of the content and subject of the work.
Although my work has a basis of some sort of representational subject, I do not want their main focus devoted to trying to decipher the imagery within the work. Rather, I want my audience to take their time and study the movement and all other formal aspects of the work. In a technological world where people consume media and entertainment instantly, I want to create work in which people slow their lives down and really react to the imagery I depict.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
I think my main advice for artists outside of the normal cliches that most young artists hear was something my dad told me about, “mastering your craft.” Referring back to the common saying, ninety percent of everything is crap, the thing that separates the top ten percent from the lower ninety is that only ten percent of artists are willing to devote their entire life into becoming the best artist they can be.
The work that really stands out, the artist that create the best artwork, music, or any other artistic craft, are the people that not only spend ten hours every day working on their craft but also take the time to continually learn how to learn. The excuse of spreading every waking moment of your life won’t be enough to create any great work. At some point artist’s need to take time and realize the thousands of hours they work won’t guarantee them anything and must work towards finding ways to improve their thinking.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
Only being the second year in college, I don’t have my work up anywhere as of now. Every now and then, I try to participate in galleries at or associated with SDSU and generally have work in a pop up shows run by a couple collectives which are run by some of my friends: mystery meat collective and gnashing. However, I am still working on gaining more exposure and people can see my work and glimpse of the creative process on my Instagram: @tcyoung51
Contact Info:
- Website: tylercyoung.weebly.com
- Email: TCYoung51@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tcyoung51/
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/mystery.meat.collective/
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