At a young age, Sean's imagination was ignited by authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey, C.S. Lewis, and Garth Nix. He has since moved on to the likes of Joseph Campbell, Neil Gaiman, and George R. R. Martin. His interest in creature design was (and still is!) facilitated through frequent trips to natural history museums, where he would spend hours drawing taxidermy and dinosaur bones. This lead him to pursue an illustration degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. While the idea of becoming a full-time fantasy/sci-fi Illustrator has now receded, his skills and interest in the field has still maintained a presence in his life.
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As a fresh-faced actor in New York, Sean attended various acting workshops and classes, realizing that the "doodles" in his notebook took new life as they captured the emotional impression of their subjects. Figure models are generally instructed to stay as still as possible for their subjects, but actors made "moving targets" that became an uncanny source of inspiration in these intimate settings, often-times revealing something profound or personal about the actor on stage.
Sean is now pursuing a body of work that can distill an essential quality of a performer in as little rendering as possible. Traditionally a portrait takes hours, days, months, or even years to finish, but the vitality of this series is in the moment or gesture, as an actor would hope to portray. These drawings are typically completed in under five minutes. The images seek to inform the subjects themselves about their own work, as well as contributing to Sean's own understanding of the craft of acting. |