Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Eckman-lawn

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?

I was (still am) a big nerd as a kid and I used to obsess over the art in comics and cartoons, copy characters out of my videogame manuals, study box art, all the usual nerd kid behavior. I remember asking my dad to photocopy pages out of “how to draw the marvel way” for me to study at home. I’m very fortunate that I knew from an early age that I wanted to pursue Art as a career, and even more fortunate to have parents that supported this.

I studied illustration at the recently deceased University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and got into working on comics and album covers as soon as I possibly could. I’ve been working with collage as part of my process for a long time, but only fully embraced it in the last 10 years or so. It’s been really gratifying to give myself the permission to work in collage, a medium I truly love.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

I’ve been very lucky but it’s never a completely smooth road. I’ve had my fair share of crushing defeats along the way. I think one of the big things that makes an artist is being able to stick with it even when times are tough. I don’t mean like “never stop grinding” though obviously practice is important. I mean like continuing to make art even if you need to get a day job to pay the bills or living with your family to save money, or whatever else it takes to keep working. This can be a brutal business with slim profit margins to put it lightly.

To give you a specific example of a very disappointing time for me- my first comic I ever worked on with my now longtime collaborator Nick Tapalansky was optioned, and in talks to be made into a show at HBO. I put aside a lot of my freelance work to focus on finishing the second volume of the book, meanwhile I was getting calls from my publisher once a week saying things like “It’s about to happen! get ready to be famous” which was a little bit terrifying for me, honestly, haha! Anyway, obviously it all fell through and It took me a few years to get my career back on track where I wanted it to be.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?

I’d say my specialty is combining collage with my years of experience in illustration. I add literal physical depth to my collage by layering the cut paper, hopefully creating a lot of visual interest in a whole other axis! I think my work is best seen in person but I really try to convey the feeling of the depth, even in my flat illustration.

I like to think I have an eye for composition and color, though even just typing that makes me feel arrogant haha! I can say I really enjoy those parts of image making. Collage lets me constantly challenging my eye to add or subtract, move elements around, see where the image takes me. It feels like the composition is always in flux, and that’s really exciting to me.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?

I use a lot of kind of extreme, or gory imagery, but I tend to think of my work as comforting, calm, surreal. For me, this is a way to confront my fears, to be in control for once. I have a lot of fear about the interior process of the human body, and mine in particular. My work helps me recontextualize the body, to make something new out of familiar elements that carry a lot of weight for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://alexeckmanlawn.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/alexeckmanlawn
• Twitter: https://x.com/alexeckmanlawn