Seattle artist, Jimm Nawrocki, has been contributing artwork to the Red Dot Auction since its inception in 2011, placing him among a very small, select group of artists who have supported the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity over the past 11 years by donating a work of art—anonymously—for each of the Red Dot Auctions. You can find him on Instagram @nrock_arts.

Growing up in Chicago, my early artistic influences were comic books and Saturday morning cartoons. I really enjoyed the crazy antics of characters such as the Roadrunner and Coyote and the adventures of superheroes such as Spiderman. I explored art in grade school, high school and community colleges before pursuing and achieving my BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I studied painting and drawing.

My current work is mixed media that is created from a variety of materials. The subject matter is figurative based, whether it is a classical or distortion of the figure. I generally start out with an image that I have manipulated with the computer and printed out on my ink jet printer. I then take that image, make different versions of it, and cut and paste parts of these versions into the original image to create a new image. I will also add different elements such as tape, googly eyes, stickers, news print, wire mesh, cardboard or whatever to the image to change it even more. I don’t have a specific goal or end result in mind when I go through this building process.

I am very much drawn to making the image into something else, deconstructing the image then reconstructing it. Looking past the obvious, the challenge is to see beyond. I enjoy changing and transforming things into something conspicuous and unique giving it strange humor and silliness. Some of my subjects are quite beautiful, others less so. The idea is to encourage those who see my work to look more carefully at the world around them, to discover beauty in strange places.