Artist’s Statement

Alex Kuno

Almost out of nowhere I found myself drawing children. They’d just constantly appear as doodles on Post-Its, in the margins of my memos at work, on envelopes and restaurant napkins. Big, loose circles gradually became giant heads with these gross, bulging eyes. Most of the people who saw them seemed more heartbroken than shocked, telling me that those faces looked weary and exhausted, like they had some sort of long and awful story to tell.

And now, five years later, these sad little bastards have become the driving focus of my art work. In each piece, they’re characters in what has become more like illustrations from some sort of an intertwining series of children’s fables that have eventually come to be collectively called The Miscreants of Tiny Town.

As more of Tiny Town’s outlying hills and riverbanks are being explored, the physical structure of the work is also slowly expanding. Images that would at one time have been matted and framed have given way to more naturalistic, freeform shapes, allowing these children more room to roam. And the longer they exist in this world, the more they seem to be 'adapting' to their surroundings; tattered dresses, suits and school uniforms from the earlier work are gradually being replaced by the costumes of birds, cats, bears, wolves, pigs and lambs. As if the children themselves are slowly molting.

Sure, Tiny Town is rife with dismemberment, abduction, cannibalism and all sorts of other terrible things that people in the “Real World” have been known to do to each other once times get tough. But however vividly or even gleefully the fear and violence might seem to be portrayed in The Miscreants of Tiny Town, these images could also be seen as playful, satirical jabs at those universal fears from childhood which inspire our very natural tendency toward savagery.