STEAMPUNK ERA 12

Studiocanoe is more than Temujin Doran. Studiocanoe isn’t just the love child of one potentially lonely, reclusive film projectionist in Falmouth, Cornwall. It is a creative project that encompasses a graphic arts agency, a short film collection and Doran’s portfolio as an illustrator. It is those particular drawings that caught our eye on a dreary wintry night, for all their cheerful post-industrial revolution panache. See, Doran may live in our present reality, but in his art and in his head, he lives elsewhere altogether. In the cafés of the Paris of yore, in trains traveling across countries undergoing major productivity and industry changes and in fields of bright red poppies. His art is vividly detailed, albeit it does not employ colors, other than the occasional red blotch. Doran draws dreams of a steampunk era that was at once in the course of industrialization and dehumanization, yet immensely alive, and replete with emotion. The artist based in London is a 2008 graduate of the Falmouth College of the arts who surely has a great sense of humor, as well as a brother he doesn’t shy away from calling a genius. He likes making films just as much as he loves drawing, and it might just be that this stems from his work as a 35mm film projectionist in an old single-screen cinema in Islington. He avowedly touts “a penchant for historical films and nonsense,” and it is this combined love of memory, beauty and humor that makes his characters gleefully skip off the page. (Source: thebeautifulist)