Marceli Tucker-Szudra

The Latest P.O.V., Ink Tracing, 2023, 25.5 x 33.5 in.

2023 Senior Exhibition Artists

Marceli Tucker-Szudra

Art + Design: Drawing

About Marceli Tucker-Szudra

Marceli Tucker-Szudra is an undergraduate drawing major at Umass Dartmouth and is on track to graduate with a BFA in drawing at the end of this semester. Through his use of three different traditional mediums, Marceli creates immersive worlds and scenes within his works that include many small details and heavy use of perspective. His pieces portray a verity of different scenes ranging from lively amusement parks to the shadowy unknown.

Statement

My goal is to create drawings and paintings that depict an immersive scene or have some sort of visual storytelling, sometimes even combining the two. Working from imagination allows me to build new worlds and watch a new narrative unfold each time. I enjoy creating strange and fictitious scenes and worlds because I’ve always enjoyed seeing the kinds of fictitious worlds and characters people create through their art and other media, Sean Andrew Murray’s gateway, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Moundverse, even things like the tightly crafted world of Avatar the Last Airbender or the insanely thought-out world of the Splatoon videogame series have always grabbed my attention the most. I’d like to replicate immersive experiences like that in my own works and have a world of my own to play with.

While working in my studio at STAR store New Bedford, I made three different bodies of works that were all made using different mediums and portray different things. One is a series of powdered graphite and conte crayon drawings that portray shadowy atmospheric scenes that show just enough to create a world for the viewer but also leave out enough for it to still seem mysterious. The second group of works is a series of paintings that show the 100-year period between the 1860s to the 1960s when British railways relied on steam locomotives. Each painting depicts a scene involving at least one locomotive as well as the railway men that worked with them. My final series is a pencil drawn and pen inked one that relies solely on my pencil and ink linework which I use to create large scenes with various characters and locations pulled from my imagination.

These works are different in terms of medium and subject matter, at first glance a viewer might not even tell they were done by the same artist. That being said three of these series do share several things in common such as the use of perspective and movement, however the most prominent element in all of my series is the creation of immersive environments. All the pieces in each series portray scenes and worlds that pull the viewer in. I include many details and layers in my drawings that give the viewer something new to look at. My use of perspective in both my drawings and paintings also help with sucking the viewer into the piece using objects that are either coming at them or moving away from them. The most perspective heavy objects can pull the viewer into the piece and using overlapping and layered elements, the viewer’s eyes can move to a different object. My powdered graphite series works a little differently, several pieces do use my perspective technique but there are some that use values to draw the viewer instead. Every powdered graphite piece uses bright lights as well as very dark darks to grab a viewer’s attention instead of objects lunging at them.

This work is very much an extension of my personal interests and fascinations. Trains were very much a part of my life from when I was only a year or two old and they’ve always stuck with me since. Rollercoasters and amusement parks, which are sometimes the subject of my drawings and illustrations, are also a big interest of mine that started around five years ago. And the atmospheric scenes are a look into my interest in foggy landscapes and unsettling situations. I have always thought that foggy landscapes were super interesting and mysterious to look at.

Each of these series take my various interests and turns them into imaginative scenes and worlds that immerse the viewer with details, perspectives, secrets, and narratives.