BIO / ABOUT :

What CLIFFTOWN means to me:

Clifton is my family name and it means town or dwelling on a mountain or hill (clif-ton); a precipice city or a cliff town. I take it more to mean: To live on the edge and to elevate one’s self and those around them.

I thought it was a good name for the collection of my artistic bodies of work, as the arts have always brought me to the fringes and edges of things, but also been my source of greatest opportunity and growth. For me, this is personal elevation through creativity.

ABOUT ME:

I think my work describes me better than words, but I see myself as an artist first and a slowly aspiring renaissance-man second, I’m half Korean and British-Canadian and find my work is influenced by the cultures and narratives I was raised with. I live in Toronto have a lot of affection for this city. My main loves outside of visual arts are, music and philosophy, poetry and martial-arts. Invention is an old infatuation that has become a new love with my recent personal explorations in 3D printing, carpentry and sculpting. I’ve always been a punk, but I believe that it’s less about spikes and musical preference at this point, more about being yourself unabashedly and loving fearlessly. I’m a fan of the classics too, there is so much to be said about standing on the shoulders of giants.

I believe in a duty to discovery; I like the idea of Michelangelo freeing statues from stone through that pursuit and see it connected across philosophies ( like Aristotle: The potential substance of a tree is in the seed). Everything is potential. I think artists must know this more innately.

CREATIVE PHILOSOPHY:

HYBRIDITY:

Experiment and take chances, make creative choices. Chance and play bring about unique juxtapositions, mixtures, harmonies and syntheses. Embrace the intersectionality of everything.

Hybridity in terms of culture and style, a duty to discovery, a love of wisdom, a decimation of duality. East and west, analogue and digital, creation and destruction, articulation and expression. To be somewhere between everything that exists and everything that observes existence. Reject polarity and division, become a bridge, follow the eye of the storm, create in the face of apathy and censors, respect and question everything. Be a dreamer, be an artist. It might all sound idealistic, but I think it’s how we perpetuate culture and thrive as humans.

VOCABULARY: Illustration is about visual articulation and phrasing (thoughts into imagery) as much as it is about evoking emotion through expression and aesthetic decisions. Illustrative artists must know the languages of expression to read between the lines and effectively communicate.

As visual communicators, understanding form and function in terms of iconography and culture is vital to effective articulation (be it for adverting and marketing, or Anarchic manifestos). Aesthetic moments are conjured up through intension, action, and interaction; this is the synthesis between communicator and viewer.

Pictured below are some rare images taken of me with my guitar by the talented Artist, Jasmine Liaw ig: @shotlucid