Hana Locks art will show streams of creative consciousness, from ink tests to doodles of bones, muscles, and flesh. From one leaf to the next, these pages are a proving ground for inspiration. More often than not, the mundane musings of daily life remain journal-bound, while more macabre meditations find their way into her body of work. Lock’s artwork, a mixture of ballpoint pen and paint, generally explores the thin semblance of flesh that separates life and death, the physical from the spiritual.
“When I was little, I was really scared of skeletons. I distinctly remember having nightmares about them. Death and skulls scared the hell out of me.”
The permanence of ink is counterbalanced by ruminations on the impermanence of flesh found in her large two-dimensional drawings. Her compositions combine science and fantasy, depicting intricate interpretations of human and animal anatomy peeled back in melted layers that illustrate the inner workings of bone and muscle, intertwined with blooming floral arrangements, fetuses, or a persistent frog hidden within the layers. “Pretty much all my pieces have at least one or two frogs hidden in there. I think it just makes the viewing experience more fun. My pieces are pretty dark, but I like adding a playful element,” she explains.
Despite her current interest in the decomposition of anatomical forms, Hana recalls a time when she feared what happened beneath the skin. “When I was little, I was really scared of skeletons. I distinctly remember having nightmares about them,” Hana says. “Death and skulls scared the hell out of me.” Hana grew up in Sunnyvale and began drawing at a young age. “I would draw cute little cartoons, Totoro, Pokémon, just like cute animals. I think the catalyst for everything was when I was 14.” At 14, Hana wandered into the California Academy of Sciences’ Skulls exhibit while visiting San Francisco with her parents. The exhibition showcased over 600 skulls from various creatures and a display that demonstrated how dermestid beetles would devour the flesh from bones, turning skulls into specimens. “I saw the exhibition and thought, ‘this is beautiful and interesting.’ It’s like morbid curiosity in a way that sucked me in, and I never left,” she recalls.
Hana’s parents have long supported her creative practice. “They were never really put off by my interest in dead things. They were really forgiving and supportive. I’m lucky. I think it’s because my dad grew up with that Asian immigrant family mindset of ‘you have to be successful.’ He decided, ‘I’m not doing that with my kids.’ ” That support from her family led Hana to earn a BFA in fine and studio arts and pictorial arts from San José State University in 2022. While in school, she rode the wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was different. We thought we would be back in a couple of weeks, but that never happened,” she says. Lockdown made classes difficult and reduced her access to studio facilities. However, she did find inspiration in her time at home, which allowed her to go big with her compositions. “At home, I would work on six by eight pads of paper and tape another piece on and keep taping and taping until I had a big piece. I realized that I could make these drawings into full-fledged pieces.”
She defined her voice in the works she produced for her BFA show, some of which also made their way into her 2024 solo exhibition at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara. “I started to get a better idea of what I wanted to draw in that last semester,” Hana says. “It was like a light bulb went off—ballpoint pen plus anatomy plus flat colors helped bring it all together.” Hana had previously submitted work to the Triton Museum’s annual Salon and 2D Art Competition & Exhibition while in college, but was finally accepted in 2023. Her 2022 piece, Guren, won best in show at the Salon, awarding her a solo exhibition in one of Triton’s galleries. Guren is a large six-foot by two-foot piece that includes ballpoint pen, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and gold foil spanning across four wooden panels. A gold foil snake winds through the composition—its body coiled through various stages of putrescence.
There is an anthropomorphic corpse, a melting skull, and a mammal fetus, all being reclaimed by sprawling foliage. On one end, the snake’s mouth is held open by a frog; on the other, the snake’s tail is a human head, mouth probed by another of the twelve frogs in the piece. Grim visages of babies, some with horns, seem to watch the piece unfold, as if the lesser-told and often gruesome cycle of life is washed across the panels. “I try to balance the grotesqueness with beauty.” Despite the macabre nature of her work, Hana is generally inspired by scientific curiosity. She levels her depictions of taboo topics with ethical consciousness, especially when referencing source materials. “I like to look at these things from a more scientific lens. Biological illustrations and medical models are a huge inspiration,” she says. “As long as they are either really old, medical models, mummies, or they’re donated, I think it’s fine. I don’t like crime documentaries. That kind of gratuitousness feels a little icky.”
Aside from human forms, Hana’s work is also inspired by Japanese culture and art. She grew up around Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism, which has found its way into her pieces. “My mom is Japanese Buddhist, so I grew up seeing cool-looking deities—big statues of Buddha, warriors, gods, demons, and folklore about death and reincarnation. I think that bled over into my work before I realized it.” Despite the inability to explore printmaking in depth while in college, Hana still hopes to translate her work into prints, citing Japanese printmaking as a significant influence. “That’s why everything is 2D in my work,” she explains. “I want to return to printmaking if I can find the materials and time. I respect craftsmen, and I have always wanted to be one—using traditional processes and working in my workshop.”
Hana still subscribes to her practice of sketchbooking, which is the foundation for her current work. In many ways, her dissection of biomechanics and investigation of organic processes such as decomposition are parallel to her intuitive creative processes. “When I start a piece, it’s usually just a sketch or a doodle that I think is nice, and I’ll convert it into a bigger sketch and go from there. I won’t know what I’m doing until the end. You can call it poorly planned—poorly planned, spontaneous, or organic.” When you flip through Hana’s sketchbook, her process is fully displayed. Between pages of notes and bubbly ballpoint bunnies, you can see components of her larger compositions. “Eighty percent of it is kind of garbage, but the other twenty percent is pretty good. It’s just somewhere to throw up ideas. It helps clear my mind. Sketchbooks are a huge part of my process. I think it’s underappreciated. That’s my advice for young artists: keep a sketchbook.”
As Hana recovers from her 2024 solo exhibition, Anatomica, at the Triton, she works as a substitute teacher in the South Bay, where she grew up. She hopes to earn an MFA but generally wants to “make a living and be able to make art. That’s all I want to do. As long as I’m drawing, I think I’m happy.” When asked what she thinks of ‘macabre’ as an adjective to describe her work, she simply shares, “Morbid, macabre, grotesque—all good.”
Historian Lewis Mumford famously stated, “The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.” History is a testament to the people, families, towns, cities, and society that are constantly changing and evolving. Art of a specific time period can bring into focus the spirit of the era, capturing a time of transformation, and revealing a guiding principle of the past.
For illustrator and graffiti artist RC, art can illuminate the zeitgeist of an era by utilizing the seemingly ordinary objects that populate people’s everyday lives. More importantly, creating art connects RC to his family, who have played an integral part in San Francisco Bay Area history.
To understand RC as an artist, we have to begin with a significant piece of Bay Area history. The late 1800s in California was a confusing time; ranchos of the Old West were slowly divided up, sold, or taken, and the days of vaqueros, dons, and wealthy land ownership were coming to an end. The transition from Mexican government land grants to American settler claims under statehood was messy. Before this transition, however, was the Robles family, who arrived in Monterey in 1797. In 1847, brothers Teodoro and Secundino Robles purchased Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito, 8,800 acres of beautiful grazing land located in what is now south Palo Alto. The family home stood at Alma Street and San Antonio Road, where Don Secundino and his wife, Dona Maria Antonia, became known for their hospitality—a stage stop between San Francisco and San Jose. They would offer refreshments, hold bear and bullfights, host fandangos, and allow hunters to ride Secundino’s beautiful horses across the property. Secundino and the Robles name became a cornerstone of late nineteenth-century peninsula life, known as the land of wealth and abundance of goodwill towards all.
“I don’t think there are any prerequisites for how a really great artist can come to be, except one—I think they need to possess a rebel or outsider spirit in some way, and it should be very natural.”
Secundino and Maria Antonia Robles are RC’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. Their story and its role in the history of the Bay Area, when the Old West began to meet the modern age, holds significant value for RC when the Old West began to meet the modern age. During this time, innovation and the natural environment lived hand-in-hand. “That time period was interesting because it was soon enough ago that we relate to the objects seen from that time, but they were created with simple materials (wood, glass, metal). There was a boom of modern-day conveniences being invented constantly, but everything still had a natural beauty to it. Most of the objects in your house back then would have been one-of-a-kind, but you could have still felt you were at the edge of innovation.”
The spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship of the Old West influences RC’s approach to art and helps frame the visual aesthetic of his work. RC explains, “I don’t think there are any prerequisites for how a really great artist can come to be, except one—I think they need to possess a rebel or outsider spirit in some way, and it should be very natural. The overarching spirit of the West is that of creative outsiders.” RC carries this spirit as his art and life occupies a space between conformity and rebellion.
RC is a software engineer—a job that pays the bills and provides health insurance—but his real passion is his graffiti work. The challenge of working within the confines of letter-shape rules and limitations, while simultaneously creating art where one feels they shouldn’t, is a welcomed one. “Graffiti is a mental and physical challenge, which gives a higher sense of achievement in return after overcoming those challenges.” The discipline of working within a certain form while applying it through a medium historically seen as vandalism mirrors the rebel spirit of the Old West.
Graffiti took hold of RC in high school when all he wanted to do was draw and tag. As his skills grew, people started hiring him for flyers, logos, or website design. Full-time graphic design wasn’t paying the bills, so he transitioned and started doing hybrid design and software engineering work. It wasn’t until the recent California wildfires and the pandemic that RC found the streets less crowded than usual. “Everyone was staying inside. I remember thinking it’d be a great time to get back on the street again in those smokey years. Then, when the pandemic hit, it was like a very not-subtle ask from the universe to paint all the Bandos in my neighborhood.”
The letter forms in his graffiti work have a heaviness to them; solid and firmly planted as if they were cornerstones to a building. Yet the letters turn and stretch into each other, bringing a lightness and life-like quality to his work. RC’s fine art illustrations follow in his graffiti’s footsteps as his subjects seem to hold a particular shape, like that of a letter form, with lines that flow and bend in the same direction, giving the subjects a sense of confinement. In one black and white illustration entitled “The Long Hat Horse Rider,” a vaquero sits upon a horse. RC illustrates a half-wooden and half-fabric horse whose legs fold upon themselves into wheels. A bird cage sits upon the haunches of the horse as the birds stick their heads out between the bars. The transformational time of the last decades of the Old West produced in ornate detail, grace RC’s illustrations. Their overall stamp-like quality further suggests the antiquity of the subjects.
As beautiful as the visual remnants of a bygone time are, those times were hard. Eventually, Secundino’s famous hospitality was slowly taken advantage of by those who desired his land, and in 1876 his estate was down to a mere 300 acres. Though the Robles family had to conform to the new norms Americans brought with them, a quiet rebellion took place as Secundino and Maria Antonia never wavered from opening up their home, offering a drink, and allowing visitors to enjoy their land. The Robles hospitality continued into the early 1890s and refreshments were handed out by Maria Antonia to passing bicyclists until she died in 1897.
RC continues to carry his family, their journey, and history with him through his art. Growing up, drawing with his older sister and grandparents planted the seed for RC to embrace the philosophy of staying true to himself. He has carried them through tough times as his art has pulled him out of a “dysfunctional state” after losing a family member to suicide. He carries them now as his graffiti work adorns the concrete landscape of Silicon Valley, the same valley where his ancestors rode across endless pastures and became known for their famous hospitality.
If art can represent the “transformation of endless becoming into being,” then it’s RC’s family and their endless becoming that his art strives to bring into being. “The story of the West, in particular, is one of having no backup plan and being on your own should something go wrong, and without any established settlements to help you, given it was the new land. My great-grandparents had 29 children. Only eight of them lived to adulthood, and I can only imagine what they went through. The strength they had to have back then is inspiring to me, and I think about it a lot when I’m drawing.”
