This pastel series, Once Upon a Time in Analog, started as a serendipitous experiment and much to my surprise became a love letter—not to a person, but to the age of analog media and the world it captured.

The dry pastels used for this series were a vintage 1960s set I found at a flea market. Unsheathing them from their patinated box felt like cracking open a time capsule; each stick bore crisp, sharp edges and vibrant colors waiting to streak across a canvas. Having never used dry pastel before, I approached my initial attempts as exploratory studies. Soon, however, I adopted an automatic process of sitting down and simply pressing "record"—in color.

The resulting art reflects the exact hues that reached for my eyes and the gestures that rattled through my hands at those specific moments in time. I fell in love with the gritty, visceral experience of the medium, but I also noted its incredible fragility. The raw pigment sits precariously on the paper, almost as if waiting to be blown away.

As I curated the best pieces from these automatic sessions, that sense of untethered fragility stayed with me. I noticed many of the gestural markings closely resembled analog frequencies or signals. It struck me that much like dry pastel, the physical reality of analog media gives it a genuine life and journey of its own—but it comes at the price of inevitable decay, making it all the more valuable while it's here.

This ephemeral nature stands in stark contrast to digital media's mathematical cloning of 1s and 0s, where everything is a frozen snapshot and anything outside of perfection is easily discarded. Digital media has its place, and clearly, I embrace it. But analog has my heart, offering a state of being worth reflecting on and carrying into the future.

I hope you enjoy the series. Thanks for visiting!

p.s. If you'd like a physical copy, prints of these pieces are available in my Redbubble shop here!