A Life Devoted to Art

Intense mentoring as a teenager gave this artist invaluable skills for his art and an understanding of the complex world surrounding him.

- Jacob Ditchmen

The earliest thing I can remember is drawing dinosaurs, and being astonished at the magnitude of my accomplishment when I drew in a background: a third dimension! I always drew growing up. I stared at animals, cartoons, and people, studying their anatomy and the way they fit together. In a sense I don’t know why I do art; it’s just always been something that just needed to come out. As I got older and got better at all of the skill-sets necessary for living in western society, I refined my artistic skills at every opportunity, mostly out of a feeling that it was a basic need. Like many in my generation I was inherently skeptical of almost everything life seemed to offer, and most of the explanations offered as to why these things were so great made no sense to me. Much of my art from a young age started out with dinosaurs and warriors in primary school, then fantastic monsters and a darker world-outlook in high-school. I drew only from imagination for over a decade before ever trying to draw anything from visual reference.

As I got older, a nihilistic and antisocial attitude developed and was mostly poured into the escapism of video games and freehand art. During high school I started attending afterschool tuition with a local artist who introduced me to the until then unexplored artistic concepts of colour, paints, pastels and life-drawing. I learned that art was about more than depicting or expressing; there was a whole world of methodology and skills to be mastered within the realms of execution and technique.