Hoolio

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on March 9, 2019 at 8:49pm

Curator’s Comments:

This piece is enjoying popularity on the site today, despite being created back in 2011.  I believe when I discovered your drawings, a couple years after that, I called them “charming and faintly disturbing.”  The same could be said of Hoolio, though the smooth modeling and heightened representation arguably make his surreal malformations all the more unsettling.  There is an alien like quality in his wide set eyes, and he appears to hold another embryonic creature formed from a grotesquely large human hand.  I’m trying to decide if there’s humor or malice in his expression.  The piece certainly is startling in its unwavering craftsmanship and detail. I believe the intense psychology of the piece, and visual success, partially relies on the viewer being within the range of “his” gaze, as he contemplates another related, smaller being.  The digitally sculpted realism draws the characters out of the realm of animated cartoon, and nearing something more like us.