Oregon based artist Morgan Rosskopf describes herself as a “visual hunter-gatherer”. In other words, her surreal, carnal works are mostly driven by her own intuitions. Her illustrations on paper combine hand-drawn elements and collage to create lush clusters of personal imagery: a messy, knotted assemblage of fragments, from the sweet and savory to bodily and grotesque. “Hunting and gathering images is both subject and method,” she explains. “I believe that all my images already exist; I just have to find them and rearrange them.”
Using the juxtaposition in her images as a visual metaphor, Rosskopf explores ideas about anxiety, dissonance, vulnerability, and love. “My work is triangulated between my studio practice, my subconscious, and my experiences, interpreted and synthesized in the act of making. Inspired by methodologies of surrealist drawing, I engage with the work in an intuitive manner, responding to the wants and needs of the drawings as they get created,” she says.
“Because there is no objective referent of comparison for these emotions, we are left to describe them using metaphor, making this area of language very fluid and difficult to pin down. I am particularly interested in illustrating how we tell the story of our lives to ourselves and how we inadvertently live by the metaphors we create. Our internal monologues hold great power; they shape our reality and reshape our memories, consolidating experiences, thoughts, dreams, and emotions into a somehow unified psychology.” Rosskopf will next show her works on May 6th in her solo “Heavy Pop!” at One Grand Gallery in Oregon.
Timothy Von Rueden's drawings range from fantastical creatures to dark surrealist visions, mostly rendered in graphite. The artist pulls from both real-life reflections and mythological inspirations, each presented in his hyperdetailed figurative style.
There are many great artists whose primary medium include pencil and paper, but the artist's sketch is not always intended as a finished work. A sketch may serve a number of purposes: it might record something that the artist sees, it might develop an idea for later use or it might be used as a quick way of graphically demonstrating an image. For those who refer to drawing to work out their ideas, a sketch becomes a rare piece seldom shared with their audience. As such, there is a special air of mystery that is associated with drawings. We've featured artists' drawings in our 
Washington, DC. based artist