Common Beauty, Saturated World 

A Love Letter to artist @choodraws 

By: Jasmine Krawczuk 

Instagram and Twitter artist @choodraws/chootalks has consistently been one of my favorite artists. Choo makes brilliant  use of bright colors and oversaturated pallets to create their works  that usually depict people or household items. Their works capture  a sense of nostalgia for something that I’ve never even felt. But  when I see their work I feel a longing deep in my chest to go back into that world. Multiple works have made me feel this way, but Choo’s style and consistency in their art never fails to bring this feeling within me. Their work has inspired my art as I too tend to use bold and saturated colors along with graphic lines. 

Their image series “Memory  Bank” is one of the first pieces  I ever saw from them. The  bright colors and clean lines  instantly caught my attention.  Additionally, the fact that  Choo made these everyday  items look so beautiful to me really sparked a love for aesthetic design in everyday items. These pieces are seemingly so random and yet make me feel emotions and memories of a life I haven’t lived (possibly more a life I would want to live). The simplicity and vibrancy caught me at once and still provides a visual cleanse whenever I see the pieces from this series. Overall it made me appreciate seemingly mundane objects in my life even more, and aspire to make my living space as beautiful as I believe these pieces to be. 

Following with the beauty in daily objects, the series Choo illustrated named “Trash” also speaks to me very deeply. These pieces also feature bright colors and bold graphic lines and shadows. Along with this, the pieces also highlight the logo and design of the bottles holding the flowers. This connects to me as I love commercial and product design, and find that logos and product labels can be extremely beautiful and nice. I like that this piece not only takes literal trash and shows the beauty in it by the reuse of old bottles, but also takes the “trash” that many associate with commercial design and shows it’s beauty through the beautiful colors and style of the illustration. Additionally, I actually do save old bottles and use them as planters, so these pieces truly do depict something that is in my life. Overall these pieces really emphasize how a simple water bottle can be depicted in such a beautiful and pleasing way. It’s a sort of idealization of life that evokes deep feelings within me, in ways I can’t even truly explain.

Overall, Choo is one of the artists that I love as their work consistently makes me feel happy and fills a longing for a time I was never a part of. Their art is one of my biggest inspirations in my art but also in how I simply go about my life.