‘I like to amplify the colors and add some drama’.
Indeed looking at the art work of Lowell Royer feels like Alice through the looking glass, vibrant colors burst and lines swirl around familiar images, almost like a fantastical realm closing resembling ours. The career artist describes this concept as ‘dramatic realism’ and has been creating art of this kind all his life. An artist of many talents he does work in the traditional form of paint on canvas, black images on a white background, white images on a black background as well as using the human body as a canvas as he designs and does tattoos. His favorite medium however is wood as he sees it as much more versatile medium which offers physical contours to add depth to his work.
‘I will do endless sketches of a painting, until it feels right’.
Success is never an easy road and the Dominican artist has been fine tuning his craft as long as he can remember. As a child he would draw but not in the usual conventional manner of replicating images seen in cartoons or books, rather he would create drawings from his own imagination. He used nature and the world around him to inspire his work and never stopped drawing graduating from sketch work to paints as he got older. As a teenager he was content with selling his drawings and doing tattoos and was opposed to the idea of learning from previous arts and what he considered ‘copying their work’. However his mentor advised him that art school would change his life and it did. ‘It blew my mind. I am a completely different artist now.’
‘It’s all about confidence. Your worst enemy is actually self-doubt.’
Lowell believes that there is no wrong or right in art and encourages other young artists to ‘just express yourself’ in art. It’s disheartening to see artists shy and second guessing their work he says. Throughout his experience in art he developed the following motto and would like to share with other young artists;
‘I can’t do it is no excuse, you’ll prove you can when you try and be good at it through practice.’
