Original painting. Oil on linen. 48×36 inches. 2025.
The Rough Beast emerges from a confrontation between tenderness and abrasion. A pale, heavily worked central form presses forward from a field of oranges, yellows, and pinks, as if heat, light, and pressure have forced it into visibility. The surface is built through scraping, dragging, and accumulation; the paint becomes skin, scar tissue, residue..
The title suggests something half-formed, unsettled, and difficult to name. Rather than depicting a literal creature, the painting holds the sensation of one: a presence caught between object, face, wound, and mask. Its thick impasto gives the form weight and vulnerability at the same time. The dark openings interrupt the soft flesh tones, creating a sense of interiority, damage, and watchfulness.
Color operates as atmosphere rather than description. The surrounding warmth is seductive but unstable, a glowing field that both shelters and threatens the central figure. The painting is less about narrative than emergence: the moment when an image begins to assert itself from material, gesture, and pressure.
In The Rough Beast, beauty is not separate from deformation. The work asks how something raw, awkward, and wounded can still insist on presence.
Original painting. Oil on linen. 48×36 inches. 2025.
The Rough Beast emerges from a confrontation between tenderness and abrasion. A pale, heavily worked central form presses forward from a field of oranges, yellows, and pinks, as if heat, light, and pressure have forced it into visibility. The surface is built through scraping, dragging, and accumulation; the paint becomes skin, scar tissue, residue..
The title suggests something half-formed, unsettled, and difficult to name. Rather than depicting a literal creature, the painting holds the sensation of one: a presence caught between object, face, wound, and mask. Its thick impasto gives the form weight and vulnerability at the same time. The dark openings interrupt the soft flesh tones, creating a sense of interiority, damage, and watchfulness.
Color operates as atmosphere rather than description. The surrounding warmth is seductive but unstable, a glowing field that both shelters and threatens the central figure. The painting is less about narrative than emergence: the moment when an image begins to assert itself from material, gesture, and pressure.
In The Rough Beast, beauty is not separate from deformation. The work asks how something raw, awkward, and wounded can still insist on presence.
Original painting. Oil on canvas, charcoal powder, pieces of a dollar bill. 18x24 inches. 2025.
This painting centers on a fragile figure suspended in a pale, nearly empty field. The body is reduced to essential signs: a mask-like face, hollow eyes, an exposed interior, and a single yellow hand or root anchoring the form at the bottom of the canvas. The figure feels both present and dissolving, as if it is being held together by gesture, memory, and material.
The work is built through restraint as much as accumulation. Much of the surface remains white, allowing small marks, stains, scratches, and dense passages of paint to carry emotional weight. The thick impasto gives the body a tactile presence, while the open ground creates a sense of isolation and silence.
The dark central cavity suggests an interior space: a wound, vessel, void, or container. Around it, the figure’s pale surface reads like skin, plaster, bone, or residue. The yellow hand introduces a note of warmth and urgency, grounding the otherwise spectral form.
Rather than describing a specific event, the painting explores vulnerability, discomfort, and endurance. It presents the body as something incomplete but still insistently visible: damaged, exposed, and alive within the quiet pressure of the surrounding space.
Original painting. Oil on canvas, charcoal powder, pieces of a dollar bill. 18x24 inches. 2025.
This painting centers on a fragile figure suspended in a pale, nearly empty field. The body is reduced to essential signs: a mask-like face, hollow eyes, an exposed interior, and a single yellow hand or root anchoring the form at the bottom of the canvas. The figure feels both present and dissolving, as if it is being held together by gesture, memory, and material.
The work is built through restraint as much as accumulation. Much of the surface remains white, allowing small marks, stains, scratches, and dense passages of paint to carry emotional weight. The thick impasto gives the body a tactile presence, while the open ground creates a sense of isolation and silence.
The dark central cavity suggests an interior space: a wound, vessel, void, or container. Around it, the figure’s pale surface reads like skin, plaster, bone, or residue. The yellow hand introduces a note of warmth and urgency, grounding the otherwise spectral form.
Rather than describing a specific event, the painting explores vulnerability, discomfort, and endurance. It presents the body as something incomplete but still insistently visible: damaged, exposed, and alive within the quiet pressure of the surrounding space.
Original painting. Oil on linen with ground bullet case brass powder and larger spent bullet pieces. 20x20 inches. 2025.
Stay on the Line is a painting about pressure, contact, and persistence. The composition is held together by lines, thick accumulations of paint, embedded spent pieces of bullets, and brass power from ground-up bullets that make the surface feel both pictorial and physical. The work moves between image and object: part body, part diagram, part wound, part objects of violence.
Materiality is central to the work. Paint is dragged, scraped, layered, and pressed into relief. The surface records the act of making as a sequence of impacts, revisions, and repairs. The embedded bullet pieces interrupt the painting and insist on the work’s physical presence.
Original painting. Oil on linen with ground bullet case brass powder and larger spent bullet pieces. 20x20 inches. 2025.
Stay on the Line is a painting about pressure, contact, and persistence. The composition is held together by lines, thick accumulations of paint, embedded spent pieces of bullets, and brass power from ground-up bullets that make the surface feel both pictorial and physical. The work moves between image and object: part body, part diagram, part wound, part objects of violence.
Materiality is central to the work. Paint is dragged, scraped, layered, and pressed into relief. The surface records the act of making as a sequence of impacts, revisions, and repairs. The embedded bullet pieces interrupt the painting and insist on the work’s physical presence.
Original painting. Oil on canvas. 72x60 inches. 2025.
afterbloom is a painting about excess, release, and the fragile blooming life of color after a traumatic event has passed. The central form rises from a dense base of reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and greens into a softer pink field, suggesting something organic that has opened, collapsed, and continued to transform. It reads as flower, body, flame, nest, or remnant without becoming any one thing completely.
The painting is built through movement. Marks gather, flare, and fold back into one another, creating a form that feels both lush and unstable. The lower half is dense and heated, while the upper portion becomes more porous and atmospheric, as if the image is moving from combustion into breath.
Pink dominates the work, but it is not passive. It becomes flesh, vapor, light, and pressure. Against it, sharper reds and oranges create urgency, while small flashes of blue, green, and yellow keep the surface alive. The painting’s energy comes from this tension between softness and intensity.
afterbloom holds the moment after fullness: after growth, after rupture, after display. It is not a still life but a state of transformation, where beauty remains inseparable from exhaustion, residue, and renewal.
Original painting. Oil on canvas. 72x60 inches. 2025.
afterbloom is a painting about excess, release, and the fragile blooming life of color after a traumatic event has passed. The central form rises from a dense base of reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and greens into a softer pink field, suggesting something organic that has opened, collapsed, and continued to transform. It reads as flower, body, flame, nest, or remnant without becoming any one thing completely.
The painting is built through movement. Marks gather, flare, and fold back into one another, creating a form that feels both lush and unstable. The lower half is dense and heated, while the upper portion becomes more porous and atmospheric, as if the image is moving from combustion into breath.
Pink dominates the work, but it is not passive. It becomes flesh, vapor, light, and pressure. Against it, sharper reds and oranges create urgency, while small flashes of blue, green, and yellow keep the surface alive. The painting’s energy comes from this tension between softness and intensity.
afterbloom holds the moment after fullness: after growth, after rupture, after display. It is not a still life but a state of transformation, where beauty remains inseparable from exhaustion, residue, and renewal.
Original painting. Oil on linen. 36x24 inches. 2025.
Wounds That Bind explores the way rupture can become structure. It is about how people in relationships can hurt each other, but they remain bound together. The painting is organized around a large pink circular form, held within a field of blue, green, red, and violet. A dark red diagonal cuts through the composition, but it also connects the parts of the image, creating a line of pressure that binds the painting together.
The work is built through dense layers of gesture, scraping, and impasto. Paint gathers into ridges and scars, while thinner passages allow the canvas to breathe. The surface feels active and exposed, as if the image has been formed through repeated acts of damage, repair, and return.
The central pink form suggests flesh, bloom, organ, planet, or shelter. It is tender but not fragile. Around it, cooler blues and greens create a shifting atmosphere, while the darker reds and purples introduce weight and gravity. The painting moves between abstraction and bodily association without resolving into a single image.
In Wounds That Bind, injury is not only a mark of separation; it becomes a site of attachment. The painting asks how forms hold together after being opened, crossed, or altered. Its beauty comes from that tension: the coexistence of softness and force, fracture and cohesion, vulnerability and persistence.
Original painting. Oil on linen. 36x24 inches. 2025.
Wounds That Bind explores the way rupture can become structure. It is about how people in relationships can hurt each other, but they remain bound together. The painting is organized around a large pink circular form, held within a field of blue, green, red, and violet. A dark red diagonal cuts through the composition, but it also connects the parts of the image, creating a line of pressure that binds the painting together.
The work is built through dense layers of gesture, scraping, and impasto. Paint gathers into ridges and scars, while thinner passages allow the canvas to breathe. The surface feels active and exposed, as if the image has been formed through repeated acts of damage, repair, and return.
The central pink form suggests flesh, bloom, organ, planet, or shelter. It is tender but not fragile. Around it, cooler blues and greens create a shifting atmosphere, while the darker reds and purples introduce weight and gravity. The painting moves between abstraction and bodily association without resolving into a single image.
In Wounds That Bind, injury is not only a mark of separation; it becomes a site of attachment. The painting asks how forms hold together after being opened, crossed, or altered. Its beauty comes from that tension: the coexistence of softness and force, fracture and cohesion, vulnerability and persistence.
UT Austin officials scrutinized anti-fascist student art show
University of Texas at Austin officials privately reviewed an anti-fascist student art exhibition over concerns it could “negatively impact the department” or strike “a chord with the wrong party,” according to internal university records obtained by Urgent Matter.
Read article in New York arts publication Urgent Matter.
The reporter wrote a follow-up article after obtaining more emails that show the dean of the College of Fine Arts was concerned about possible “attendant actions or activities” around an anti-fascist student art exhibition days before it opened.
Read follow-up article: Records show UT Austin leaders concerned about ‘activities’ around anti-fascist art show
In August 2026, I will begin attending graduate school to get an MFA from the VCUarts Department of Painting + Printmaking on a full scholarship. “We are truly excited about your work—the faculty and the admissions committee were deeply impressed by your portfolio and conversation during the interview. We would love to have your voice in the department this fall”.
VCU is the number 2 highest ranked Fine Arts Graduate School in the U.S..
Stay on the Line
Oil on linen with ground bullet-case brass mixed into the pain(t) and larger spent fragments embedded directly into the impasto, 20x20 inches, 2025
Stay on the Line is about a struggle between fascists and students. Based on the April 2024 protests at The University of Texas at Austin when students repeatedly yelled out “Stay on the Line” as they faced down approaching fascist police. I embedded spent bullet casings into paint to represent how the state misuses its monopoly on the use of legal violence to quash dissent.
The Rough Beast
Oil on linen, 48x36 inches, 2025
The Rough Beast is a depiction of how the conditions for fascism have always existed in the culture of the United States,waiting to rise, like the line in the poem by W.B.Yeats, “The Second Coming”, from which the title is taken.
Wounds that Bind
Oil on linen, 36x24 inches, 2025
Wounds that Bind examines how harm does not merely separate but entangles—how collective trauma, inflicted and endured, becomes a form of connection. It suggests that under fascistic conditions, violence reorganizes intimacy, loyalty, and belonging. We must live together ultimately but we will always carry the wounds that both bind us together and remind us of the pain we cause each other.
afterbloom
Oil on canvas, 72x60 inches, 2025
afterbloom - a meditation on what persists after devastation, afterbloom explores fragile emergence in the wake of authoritarian violence. Neither purely hopeful nor purely bleak, it asks whether regeneration is possible when the soil itself has been poisoned by history.
Contemporary Art Under Fascism
Call for Artists
“Contemporary Art Under Fascism”
Curated by Scott Cobb
Exhibition Dates April 17-18, 2026
Opening Reception April 17 from 4 - 8 pm
Venue: University of Texas at Austin Art Building,
2nd Floor, Large Crit Space,
2301 San Jacinto Blvd, Austin, Texas 78705
Contemporary Art Under Fascism comes at a time when democracy in the U.S. faces an existential risk by the rising threat of fascism. The exhibition aims to address concerns about fascism and its impact on democracy in the U.S.
The exhibition was curated by Scott Cobb.
Awards: Best in Show, 2nd and 3rd place awards were chosen by Ricky Morales and Meredith Williams of Martha’s Gallery in Austin.
Wanewaste
Oil on canvas, 48x35 inches, 2025
Students of Artemisia
Oil on canvas, 48x36 inches, 2026
Painting. Drawing. Printmaking. Photography. Film.
Charcoal on paper, 18x24
Ashes and Shadow is a deeply personal work created in the aftermath of my mother’s funeral. It reflects on the profound weight of grief and the fragile beauty of memory. At its center, the empty box—once holding her ashes—stands as a stark symbol of loss and finality. Surrounding it is the shadow of a single rose, a quiet reminder of love’s enduring presence, even in the face of absence.
Oil on canvas
Oil on canvas
Lithographic Print
Oil on canvas
48x36 inches
Photograph Digital
Screenprint
The Last Art Show Before Fascism
Curated by Scott Cobb
Exhibition Dates April 18-19, 2025
Opening Reception April 18 from 4 - 8 pm
Venue: University of Texas at Austin Art Building,
2nd Floor, Large Crit Space,
2301 San Jacinto Blvd, Austin, Texas 78705
The Last Art Show Before Fascism comes at a time when democracy in the U.S. faces an existential risk by the rising threat of fascism.
The exhibition features a diverse array of artworks, including paintings, lithography and serigraphy prints, sculptures, photography, drawings, video, fiber art, and more. The event aims to address concerns about the rising threat of fascism and its impact on democracy in the U.S.
‘Last Art Show Before Fascism,’ a stark warning of state of democracy
by Charlotte Karner, Senior Life&Arts Reporter, The Daily Texan
April 18, 2025
Photograph
Photograph 120mm film
Photograph 120mm film
Photograph, 120mm film
Photograph 120mm film
Monoprint
Oil on canvas, 48x36”
Photograph
Oil on canvas, 20x16 inches
Photograph
Photograph
Photograph
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Changing, Pastel on paper
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The Kiss. Oil on canvas
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Alone, Oil on canvas
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Drain Shift, Pastel on paper
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Oil mixed with white sand on canvas
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Charcoal on paper
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Texas bullets
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Pastel on paper
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Intaglio on paper
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Oil on canvas
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Charcoal on paper
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Pastel on paper
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Charcoal and pastel on paper
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Pastel on paper
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Monoprint
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Oil on paper
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Oil on paper
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Oil on paper
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Oil on canvas
Photograph 120mm film
Pastel and conté on paper
Pastel and conté on paper
Pastel, charcoal and toilet paper on paper
Pastel and conté on paper
Photograph 4x5 film
Films
Ex Patria
Ilyana offers a last souvenir to Erica on the final day of their study abroad year, sparking a discussion of values and identity with their futures on the line.
Written and Directed by Scott Cobb
Starring Shelby Graham and Rebecca Karpovsky
Cinematography by Colemar Nichols
7 minutes 30 seconds
Overwood
A long-lost sister fallen from family grace and bearing the scars of her rebellions returns after the death of the Father to "Overwood", her childhood home. She encounters her younger sister's undying love and her older sister's bitter resentment.
Directed by Scott Cobb
Starring Angelina Castillo, Morgan Floyd and Ali Meier
Winner Best Short Screenplay at Hill Country Film Festival
Written by Scott Cobb, Angelina Castillo, Morgan Floyd and Ali Meier
Ilyanica
20 years after a traumatic event, two friends meet in an abandoned detention center in Poland where one has become involved with a group of radicals occupying a former black site run by the CIA where the U.S. tortured.
Written and directed by Scott Cobb
Starring Circe Sturm and Cynthia Fray.
Cinematography by Colemar Nichols
17 minutes 24 seconds
The There
Two American women who turned their backs on their homeland and spent most of their 20s living together as expatriates in Berlin, Germany reunite in Austin, Texas at Deep Eddy Pool and find their lives have taken divergent paths.
Directed and Written by Scott Cobb
Starring Teresa May Nichta and Venus Monique
Cinematography by Colemar Nichols
9 minutes 19 seconds
Performance Art
The Recrudescence of Bas Jan Ader 2024
3 minutes 25 seconds