I am a Filipino-American Chicago-based visual artist and USMC veteran specializing in mixed media portraiture and figure painting. Throughout my career, psychology and identity have served as thematic axioms to my ongoing narratives of internal discovery. Through my art, I am deeply passionate about nurturing self-awareness, spirituality, and mindfulness.

My work blends elements of traditional realism with pop and urban art with the aim of creating an exciting and inviting visual aesthetic as a portal into introspective dialogues of a spiritual and psychological nature. It is my hope that by creating and offering alternative ideas, I can help diminish our capitalistic society’s over-abundance of for-profit consumption-oriented media designed to produce a longing for more.

The topics and dialogues most significant to me range from the spiritual (ex: Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle) to the scientific (ex: Carl Sagan, Yuval Noah Harari). It is my belief that there are critically observable correlations between a culture’s habits of consumption and its peoples’ quality of life. In the case of the US, rising rates of obesity, violence, and suicide reflect a continuously growing sense of unfulfillment resulting from outdated myths and misperceptions pertaining to the pursuit of happiness.

The pursuit of happiness is inherently flawed. Pursuit implies lacking, and happiness is temporal. What results is a cyclical, recursive loop of escalating aims. While the constitution decrees the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it does not decree the promise of happiness itself. It is the responsibility then of the individual to define for his or herself what happiness is, but in a capitalist society, that path towards fulfillment is corrupted by external influence motivated by commercial profit and political gain.

It isn’t inherently problematic that Capitalism is fueled by profits, but a lack of deep and masterful understanding of this is. Mitigating the rise of unfulfillment can improve by improving education of the consumer in consuming more responsibly and ethically. A surplus of self-help books, positivity seminars, and mobile therapy apps indicate an existing push in this direction. The next significant milestone to reach would be to unanimously define a cohesive definition of what ‘responsible consumerism’ is.

juliusdcbautista.com, @juliusdcb, @paintingwithbeast