D.J. Rees

Biography:

It is my intention that through each piece, whether mundane or abstract, you find an amalgam of fascination, interest, and passion.

As one who has spent much of his life growing in the rural areas of Pennsylvania, U.S. with the opportunity to travel and interact within different social strata, I have been granted a blessing that many born and raised in rural areas do not often get - multifaceted perspective. This can be said for anyone capable of leaving their day to day behind to experience life under different circumstances. This became my interest. Growing up on an 8 acre plot of field and woods in a place called Bumpville I had an advantage in cultivating my imagination and fed it what information I could compile about the fascinating like magick, nature beings, underground army bunkers and mad scientist inventions often using the same stick or stone to create the imagined scenarios and people (as the closest person my age lived 2 miles away up the two longest hills in Bumpville) which kept my creativity hungry throughout my adult years.

After a rather rocky but phenomenally fun journey into my late 20s, I spent yet another 20 year delving into my passion of supporting the success of and advocating for teens and young adults that had become entangled in the children's and forensic (courts and incarceration) systems. Being primed to think outside the box I dare say it was my creativity, isolation, and travelling to new lands that made it possible to establish and grow statewide programs with the intent to give these beings of potential an often never known understanding and ability to find opportunity and success.

What the hell does this have to do with art!? Beside the obvious creativity and bountiful collection of experience and observation to be described and documented, it has left me with the hidden; the small differences and the larger but shyer similarities, the whispered hopes and fears we all have in common, and the dreamscapes and night planes where we somehow find ourselves meeting each other.

These are the things I hope to share, the only way they can truly be communicated - through art and imagery and they prose and verses conjured by combining a scene and a title. There is magick in the world, people can transform into superheroes... or villains, and we can find portals in almost any cupboard or crossroads. To find the fantastic in the mundane we just need to stay curious.

This is my intent to present an amalgam of fascination, interest, and passion for you to find, whether within the mundane or abstract.