Kyle Cobban Draws From The Unknown
When the Bulls Fest—a raging celebration of the iconic and famed NBA team—first happened at Chicago’s United Center in 2022, Kyle Cobban was one of the contributing artists to The Art of the Game exhibition. It’s a piece that encapsulates Cobban’s aesthetic vision. Working with graphite and paper, the Chicago-based artist makes small, detailed drawings based on digital collages. In many instances, he merges fragments of humans, homes, and landscapes to create surreal imagery that can prompt viewers to consider the interior worlds on the drawings’ subjects. “That’s one of my favorite pieces that I’ve made, mainly because I’m a big sports fan,” the artist divulges.
In this piece, Cobban thought about his hometown’s basketball team and the neighborhoods where they are most beloved. The centerpiece is a young man wearing a Bulls starters jacket reminiscent of those dating back to the 1990s, the decade in which the team won six championships. Surrounding and overlapping the man are fragments of images—mostly depicting homes in the city.
“It’s an amalgamation of the Chicago neighborhood aesthetic with a Bulls fan, quite literally,” says Cobban. “It’s kind of on the nose, but that’s how I juxtapose the elements of my work, with the structure of a home and then a figure who is around or in the home.”
Cobban has always been a drawer. “Growing up, I was pencil-first, mainly because I don’t like making a mess,” he says, adding that pencil and paper is a practical option too. “I’m very tidy and it’s very easy. It’s just one piece of paper, one pencil.” Later, after he finished college and embarked on a career as a teacher, Cobban began submitting designs to Threadless and learned how to make digital art in the process.
“I started playing around with different processes to create really interesting and elaborate works, and the best way that I found was through collaging,” he recalls. Cobban spent a handful of years making digital art before coming back to the humble combination of paper-and-pencil.
SOMETHING ABOUT NOT HAVING THE PHYSICAL TOUCH OF THE WORK GROSSED ME OUT A LITTLE BIT…I WANTED TO PHYSICALLY TOUCH MY WORK AND I WANTED TO GET BACK TO DRAWING…”
“I had this epiphany: If the internet were to go, or the grid were to somehow go away, my art is gone,”
Cobban explains. “Something about not having the physical touch of the work grossed me out a little bit.”
Cobban decided to focus on making art for himself—“I wanted to physically touch my work and I wanted to get back to drawing,” he says—which ultimately led to a practice that brings together digital and handmade processes. He took multiple images, and manipulated them in Photoshop to create the collages that would serve as the references for his drawings.
It’s the pencil that, through seamlessly fusing together these various references, adds a surreal element to the works. “When you see a digital collage and you have references from different quality sources, it looks like a shitty digital collage,” he says. “But when you take that collage and you draw it with pencil, it feels like one image.”
For the past several years, Cobban’s reference materials have come heavily from collections of found photos, which he scans and then manipulates. The source material provides intrigue in addition to interesting aesthetics. Cobban thinks about the anonymous people who are in the photos. “Where are these people now? What are they like? What were they like? Were they a good person or a bad person? Did they have a family?” he wonders.
WHERE ARE THESE PEOPLE NOW? WHAT ARE THEY LIKE? WHAT WERE THEY LIKE? WERE THEY A GOOD PERSON OR A BAD PERSON? DID THEY HAVE A FAMILY?”
It’s a similar reaction to when he sees abandoned places. “I think about the last person that locked the door or the last person that did something meaningful in that place,” he says. “What was the last thing that happened in this place? Did someone think that they were going to come back, but they never did, and it just sits now?”
Recently, Cobban collaborated with artist Won Kim to create a single piece that fused the former’s drawings with the latter’s acrylic and spray paint style. “We’ve talked about art so much together, and I’ve never really done anything like that before,” Cobban says. So he gave a drawing to Kim, who is known for his colorful street art pieces and told him to do his thing. “I was like, don’t even tell me, just do it.”
In the finished piece, two people look into the distance filled with soft, cloud like shapes in various shades of green. “I would like to do a couple more of those with him because they’re fun and it’s nice to get out of this closet and talk to someone else about art,” says Cobban from his home studio.
His works vary in size. Some are as small as 4” x 3”. But even the large ones tend to be 5” x 7” images on an 8” x 10” sheet of paper. He likes working on compact pieces. “I can fold it. I can take it. I can feel it,” he says.
Plus, the small size allows Cobban to make drawings faster. “It doesn’t take as long as a big drawing,” he says. “I didn’t want to sit with a drawing for a really long time,” but, he adds, it does take quite some time to add elements of realism to the images.
“I like how portable it is and how easy it is to work in my space,” he says.
At home, Cobban has a rack where he files away his drawings. “That’s it. I move on to the next thing,” he says. “It’s never been like I want to make this my career.”
For thirteen years, Cobban worked as a high school art teacher before moving into a career as a full-time graphic designer. “It’s really hard to be an artist and the hustle is so impressive for these people to make it their career,” he says. “I’ve been lucky enough where I never had to make it my career in a way. It’s always been something that I’ve been passionate about and just do.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 67, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
On the section marked “Giant Drawing” on Sergio Barrale’s website, a factoid provides a sense of the hardship that goes into each portrait: “500-700 pencils died in the process of making these works.” Look into any corner of Sergio’s “faces,” and you’ll believe him.
In his current show at Copro Gallery, Allen Williams offers haunting visions in the form of new paintings and drawings. "The Hidden Light," running through Jan. 11 at the space, features both lush scenes and sparse studies in the artist's mysterious style. Williams was last featured on our site here.
Taiwanese artist Hui Chi Lee presents a peculiar image of the human figure. She crowds her drawings with masses of bodies lumped together and entangled in threads and strands of human hair. Full of energy, her images explore themes relating to materialism, human behaviors, and relationships in today's society, made all the more dynamic when implemented in a larger than life scale. Working mainly in pen, graphite and colored pencil on paper, her choice to use non-traditional painting materials ties with her goal as an artist: simply to create imagery that will inspire a curiosity about the implications of her work.
Ozabu only uses pencil and graphite in her startling figurative works on paper, using elegant linework and subtle iconography in mysterious minimalist pieces. The Japanese artist is self-taught, and the artist’s long fascination with birds comes through in how figures are accompanied by and are overtaken by winged creatures.