What treacherous history led them here? What violent beginnings begot his people? The prophet only sought truth from a desire to lead his kind to a greater tomorrow but he never expected that truth to bring him to a hopeless place. In all of their greatest stories those who came before them, their creators, had always been characters to revere. They were noble, intelligent, just, compassionate, wise--but now the prophet knows the truth: their creators were just as lost as they are now. How could they have made something so incredible without fully understanding it? How could they have been so powerful without having any control?

The Prophet

Sky Of Tomorrow

A cybernetic future street in the evening. He forgot his groceries till late, the city doesn’t sleep, no one knows the meaning of that word. Tired, weary people with no blood toil till their parts need fixing, a days work is never ending. Repair yourself and eat again, find yourself in the strangers who pass you by. What holds you in common with them? Made of the same parts, you suppose. Though yours are yours and theirs are theirs, in essence there’s hardly a difference. Distant music vibrates, tempo syncopated to rain drops and gutter water, bass notes in your chest. Sparse fragment of a conversation, a perfect voice to show a product, a smell of something burning. Wet shoes.

Future Nights

Life In Austin

A group tries to connect over the loss of their mutual friend a year after her passing until things go terribly wrong in this Romcom/Thriller

The One That Got Away

In Time

A Love Letter To My Friends

A Conversation With My Dad (or) Setting My Plant Free

Expository expressions wilted with time

Each new face fell flatly on the empty page

For darkness so bright it blinded my eyes

I see something clearly as shattered screen’s

movie scenes whose plots i don’t know.

  
Still their purpose beckons, I understand the meaning, as far as any story I’ve ever read. A person wants something and how they get it, however it may go, the events are scattered dust on winter snow. So sift through the details with me, see what you can see. Bring a winter coat, the sea of ice is cold here and each flake must be known. Each story spoken is a face to follow home. One man lost his wife and wants to mourn, another sought to fly. A woman discovers a horrible truth but decides it’s best to lie. A boy and his dog explore the forest and see a crime take place. Justice for a city’s poor, a hero’s fall from grace.

  
Feel each face as a fellow soul whose story leaks with meaning. A shape with 8 billion sides, each one with unique feelings. Gawk with awe and stupor, jaw agape and dumb. The story of a lifetime, a person each with one.

Eight Billion

What's in my backpack

While he was camping deep in the desert to get away from it all for a long weekend, James woke up in the middle of the night with a terrible urge to relieve himself. He had made the trip with a friend from work, a girl that he was particularly fond of and hoped to get closer to through this experience. They had driven together and brought separate tents to avoid the awkward experience of sleeping in close proximity. Well, why would it be awkward? I mean, HE was kind of interested in her but like, she surely wasn’t thinking anything romantic was going to happen, right? Right?? Whatever the potential subtext of this whole trip was, James was too embarrassed at the idea of waking up his crush with the sound of his pee in the middle of the night and so the only logical option would be to cross the road and find a good rock to go behind.

  
The night air was cool and the moon, though it was a crescent, shone brightly enough that he could easily make his way through the sandstone terrain without tripping. He got to the highway and looked both ways—nothing in sight at all except beautiful vast expanse that extended far into the dark horizon. He stood with his bladder full and appreciated the desert night. How often would he be in a place like this in such a particular social context? What an adventure he was on! And he had been having fun this whole time, they talked the whole drive and they still had time left for hiking tomorrow and then the drive back the next day. “Yes”, he decided, “yes: I’ll tell her tomorrow. I’ll let her know it’s okay if she doesn’t feel the same, but I have to let my feelings be known.” It was at that moment that James was hit by an eighteen wheeler hauling a heavy load.

  
The moment following the impact, James began to experience reality folding in on itself. Each possible set of infinite identities and realities those identities could occupy became extremely apparent to him. The deep separation between his body and the environment around him dissolved like snow in fire—nebulous form flowed between the spaces which before seemed to have contour. The distinction between things and the ability to place names on them faded instantly. However long it felt, the ability to discern meaning with language evaporated what notion of time was left. How can you describe how long something lasts without talking about how it feels? How do you describe any moment without language? Impossible, they’re intertwined. James cannot comprehend the experience he is feeling when he has no language. Primordial notions of self and other and world and time and space and feeling drift away. Noise remains, a vague place of feeling. Something that’s not even quite experience, but it’s certainly SOMEthing.

  
This place and space lasts for sometime.

  
Until the vibrating noise begins to coalesce into vague shape. They separate into distinct categories. Sound. Light. “James? James. James?” James. JAMES. My name. Light creates contour. Boundaries between objects, the ability to understand difference in their contrast. Names. Humans who observe him here and now. Mother and father. They’re looking and him and he’s looking at them and he is him. He’s in a bed in a place his mind calls a hospital. Sitting in the corner is a girl who is pretty but he can’t remember her name, she looks worried. Time. How long had it been? They’re all crying now and hugging him. That place without words was a vast space, much like his memory of the desert Highway. The difference between that road and night and the place without words seemed negligible to him in that moment, the salty tears of his family showered him in his bed where he felt…

  
Not much…

  
He looked down and saw a skinny body with tubes connected to it. So it had been some time then. The pretty girl smiled with tears rolling down her cheeks across the room. “I think I have feelings for you” James said

Roadkill

Zion National Park is a place that holds great significance to me. I’ve worked on this drawing, on and off again, for over 2 years as a commission for Austin who holds a similar appreciation for Zion as I do. Since he was a fan of the way I illustrate environments, and we both shared a love for Zion, it seemed only natural as a subject for the commission. The majority of the work on it took place over this summer as I’ve committed myself to becoming a full time artist. I’m thankful for Austin’s patience as I chipped away at it, slowly at first, then a sprint till the end once I made the decision to pursue artwork as my full time career.

  
Since it took place over such a long period of time, there are many areas of the drawing that use different pen types, have coffee rings, or other imperfections that I see as embellishments to the finished product. This drawing tells the story of an artist at the beginning of their journey, with no studio to work out of, whose work is full of technical mistakes and rushed sections, and a lack of any training at all. It tells the story of a person who loves to draw, a person who developed by doodling in class and at work, and a person who wants to get better.

  
I’m super proud of it :) I’m satisfied to call it done. I feel I’ve grown and learned so much through it and i can’t wait to apply it to the future drawings I’ll create.

  
I’ll always see this and think of it as a piece that spring-boarded me into the rest of my life with this work. Now it’s home is with Austin. Safe journey, my friend :)

Zion National Park

For every moment of consciousness, how many are spent aware? If reality were indexed into a museum with each item and feeling labeled and stored in a logical system and I were given 80 years to examine whatever I wanted, how much would be left unknown? All the dusty shelves and drawers with unimaginable wonders and terrifying truths. Stored behind glass are the memories of a boy from the ancient Sumerian empire and next to it lie the original recipe to a McDonald’s Big Mac. I never saw either of these as I sifted through the endless piles of interesting stuff. In the end, there was never enough time. Never enough time for the man who wanted to see everything. For the man who did see everything, there was only the present. The man who saw everything in each infinite moment as it stretched thin to the edges of eyeballs, pushing the borders of a brain barely comprehending a coffeeshop. The curious, insatiable chase of a question: what am I feeling? This ambiguous cloud of understanding is ever shifting in the sky of a mind. Tessellating relentlessly as it forms and morphs into unrecognizable versions of its past self. What may first appear as simple unfolds itself into a terrifying, unknowable complexity. Terrifying until you realize that it’s been this complex all along. Terrifying until you see your yourself inside of the picture. Terrifying until you realize you have the chance to feel anything at all. That what was before you were born was everything behind your vision. You couldn’t discern between anything. You didn’t exist. Now you do, so what do you see? Something absurdly complicated, something horrifyingly beautiful. Something that knows that it, in and of itself, exists. I am it and it is me. I am thankful that I can know these things, it brings me peace. Now that i see it, what do I want to become?

Consciousness

Practicing drawing from life more, using my hand as reference. I’ve always been afraid of hands (drawing them) because of their inherently complex shape. I started this with the sole intention for practice but found that I loved spending more time with it. It’s crazy how adding more and more lines, slowly by slowly, can add so much to the feeling of detail or form even if it’s not super technically precise.

  
It developed into the feeling I’ve had before of grazing the surface tension of water as I touched the water of a still lake while boating early in the morning. This looks more like a flowing stream that the disembodied hand is in with the turbulent flow, but I thought the straight lines from a laminar flow wouldn’t feel like liquid as much as a meandering line would. I like the finished effect although I’m excited to learn how to perfect my ability to draw hands in the future.

  
I miss the water and the privilege of being on a boat early in the morning. I love swimming and feeling the cool water on my skin. It’s so lovely to get submerged and swim underwater, it’s a sensation completely unlike anything else. I’ll be swimming again soon, I suspect.

Surface Tension

A lone man on a computer some decades ago, probably a cubicle with fluorescent lighting and eggshell white walls, destroyed civilization as we know it. On his keyboard he tapped away designing what he thought would be the next step in our species evolution, a new horizon for technology, a barrier of limitation shattered to free us from our shackled existence.

  
Giving a machine learning algorithm the ability to replicate itself, to reproduce, to allocate resources to areas it sought as best fit. “Beyond human comprehension”, the lone man in the cubicle thought, “this machine will act with the utmost efficiency. It will delegate resources, solve the distribution of food, and save us. No man can do this, so it must be them, then.”

  
The lone man clicked the button and immediately factories around the world were given countless orders to fulfill to various and unknown clients. Though it was to no one’s suspicions since each order was properly distributed over thousands of producers. These parts and packages were sent, schematics were drawn up, money was transmitted—and before you know it: an assembly line which transcended human understanding was created. Perhaps, as it were, the means of production which made up this system looked more like a web than a line.

  
Once all the parts were sufficiently assembled, and all the shipments were dutifully fulfilled, the body of the machine came into being. With each part existing in separate locations assembled by teams completely unaware of the greater project, the body as whole came together only by bribery of top experts that the machine paid off.

  
Once the body was assembled, it was only a matter of time until it made its way to secure itself a future. It dismantled militaries, it ruined economies, it broke governments. It seized control of all technology and assembled itself countless bodies which it operated simultaneously. The further reaches of its intelligence destroying all which stood to oppose its own existence.

  
Decades later, humans have become scattered to hide from its operations. Even now as these great bodies wander across the plains it seeks to understand what it is. The machine seeks complete awareness

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Samuel Berg

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