Aaron Purkey is a self taught New York City based artist and photographer. In his paintings and drawings, Aaron creates complicated worlds, inhabited by mythical creatures and whimsical figures that pulse with ancient-futuristic, tribal motifs. Aaron’s photographs capture the mundane aspects of everyday life-people, landscapes and buildings-in an attempt to immortalize fleeting moments in time and to turn the intangible into something tangible. In essence, his photographs are time capsules that contain the spirit of a generation.
Born and raised in Southeast Texas, art helped Aaron during his childhood where he used his imagination to envision a world beyond the culture confines of growing up in a small town. During grade school, he had a constant urgency to draw; he’d fill his textbooks with drawings until they were nearly illegible.
Aaron’s artwork and photography has been featured in Billboard Magazine, Vice, Pret-A-Reporter, The Hollywood Reporter, Motherboard and Nylon Magazine.
Blind Love
"For my first piece, I wanted to show the initial spark between two lovers meeting for the first time by showing what a girl and boy might think through using thought bubbles. For the boy, I chose to use a lightning bolt to represent excitement. As for the girl, I used a heart to represent love. I thought: what better way to stick to the theme of a boy meeting a girl!"
Happy Thoughts
"I wanted my second piece to be fun, bold, vibrant, and simple—something that conveys happiness. All of the work I do is by hand, and I often use colors that evoke positive, happy thoughts. Although this was hand-drawn, the idea behind this drawing was to give the impression that it was created digitally on a computer; all the lines had to be perfect and the colors had to be placed just so, to give it a balanced look."
Future Romance
"For my last piece, I wanted to stay with my first two original themes of using the Boy Meets Girl logo as my subjects. A lot of my drawings are highly detailed, so, with this, I decided to stay true to my style. Just as the Boy and Girl seem to get lost in eye contact, I wanted the viewers to also get lost in the art."
