We recently connected with Dylan Hyman and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Dylan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I thoroughly enjoy teaching myself skills – not exclusively art & illustration, but in all areas of life. I believe learning things by yourself gives the mind a greater attachment & fundamental understanding of the skill at hand. This doesn’t mean I don’t research the skill beforehand or ask for help when I need it, but I like learn from my own mistakes & continually improve. I have always loved doodling, sketching “nothing” – & I can’t even remember what prompted me to start this “postcard” series…likely some drug induced aha! moment..but there was just one night where I sat down & drew my first postcard – it spiraled out of control from there. Over time, I got better, understood the world I was creating, learned what I liked & what I didn’t like…taking the time to reflect on my past work influenced how/what I wanted produce in the future.

If I could go back & tell myself to do something different with this postcard series, I would highly suggest to my past self to take things at a slower pace. Allow time to reflect on a day’s work, allow the space to think about the piece before calling it “done”. I would rush myself to get a postcard out the night I started on it – but I now have a better appreciation for working on something over the course of a few days, weeks, months…(thanks to my partner Kayla). There is definitely something to say about capturing something in the moment, but that’s not say you have to stop there – take a minute & ask yourself if it is truly done or if it is just simply a draft of something greater. There is no rat race to speed through, no end to reach, just a continuous experience that we elegantly fumble through.

The biggest obstacle to me (this is true for most artists) is myself. Everybody is their own worst critic – & it is not fair to yourself to judge your work so harshly! Of course, be honest with yourself & challenge your work, but understand that you will always find flaws or shortcomings in your work because you are the one that created it. Some of these “flaws” may make your work unique, attractive, or bold – “We don’t make mistakes – we have happy accidents.” (Bob Ross). Once you can get yourself out of the way & just allow the process to take place organically, beautiful things happen & in return, you feel better about your work which feeds into the work itself.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I enjoy creating personas/pseudonyms for the different extensions of my art – it helps me differentiate & create defined borders between my disciplines. For illustrative/visual work, I go by alan_browne_ (a nod to my favorite chef/tv personality of all time, Alton Brown). The main project of this persona was my postcard series – little scenes you can send your friends (or enemies…). I miss the era of postcards because it was a cheap, efficient way to send people cool prints through the snail mail, no matter how far away it was. You only had so much room to write so you had to condense your thoughts down to fit on this 4×6 card. There is just something special to holding one in your hands – knowing that it had quite the journey from A to B (from alan to browne!). Now we just send people braincell killing, 30 second clips of people doing dumb shit for views…which has a place but it most certainly does not do much for our happiness in life.

alan_browne_ is the visual juxtaposition of the arid, hallucinogenic backdrop of our everyday life & the viscous, inescapable vignettes of that sick called love. ab. began as a mildly (maybe not so mildly…) stoned experiment & steadily evolved into a world of its own – layered in an infinite horizon of burning sand, sparsely seasoned with prickly cacti, an ever-drifting bounty of lackadaisical tumbleweeds, the zeitgeist oozing with a mucous-like love, & of course…even more sand (slightly hotter, slightly finer). this two-tone environment is inhabited by the representation of mankind – learning to live in isolation with the vegetation that has existed (more so survived) before the thought of mankind had ever been conceived. much of ab.’s work deals with the unconscious making its way to the more visible, tangible surface, many times in a not so pleasant way. i hope my art makes you laugh, cry, reflect, wince, daydream, vomit, empathize, or everything at once…remember – it’s only artë?

At the end of the day, I create art because it does something for me & me alone. Of course validation is nice as an artist, but if your work doesn’t fulfill some need in your soul, what’s the point? Maybe there doesn’t even need to be a point, but I’d like to believe that art does something for the mind, the giver or the receiver. My art represents a tap in my unconscious, allowing built up emotional energy to leak out like syrup from a tree. It gives me relief from everyday bullshit – & I know that it will likely do the same for somebody else. And if it doesn’t, at least it was able to do something for me.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Building a collection of work that documents who you were/are at a certain period in time – a breadcrumb trail of your identity as a person, an artist. I’ll go through my postcards & reflect about where I was when I thought it up initially, & it always just takes me back to that exact moment in time & I can feel what I felt like back then. The deep realization that we have grown & changed as a person…it is just something that I don’t think we take enough time to think about. We are always onto the next thing, but without the conscious effort to understand how you got to where you are now, you will just keep walking circles & pulling the blinders tighter over your eyes. Unknowingly creating these “time capsules” is just a cool thing I think creative people of all types will understand.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I want to leave a mark on this reality before I move onto the next…I want somebody to look at what I did & feel something, anything. My art serves to document me as a person, who I am, what I like, what I want to say – so my output of work more or less parallels my development & understanding of myself. I want to keep challenging myself to find new ways to express how I am feeling, because I know there is a good chance somebody else has felt the same way, & perhaps my art can help that person understand what’s going on in a clearer light. Humor is a big part of my being, so when I can make myself laugh, I know I have something good.

Contact Info:

• Website: brownetowne.me
• Instagram: @alan_browne_
• Other: Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BrowneTowne I also make music under the name teevee. & it is another extension of my work: experienceteevee.bandcamp.com @experienceteevee On all streaming services as well!