Paintings Drawings Illustrations
Photography Illustrated Books
Contact & Bio Page
Click Image above for portfolio
A video giving a brief tour of the site, narrated by Sandro Sebastian.
Hello and welcome…
To the personal portfolio website of artist and writer Sandro Sebastian. His art practice is intended to reach into the past and draw inspiration from cultures and peoples far removed from our modern day perspective.
Boys Bleed Publishing House : Illustrated Books by Sandro Sebastian
Written and Illustrated by Sandro himself, these are easy to read, young adult books with full color illustrations. View full list of titles by clicking on images below. Purchases are made through Amazon.com.
Visit the official Art Monk Blog
Sample Blog Post:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: by Mark Twain
Another visit with an American legend, Mark Twain. I’d read this book before, and it recently popped back into my mind as I was thinking about the purpose of the arts and literature, and history. To feel engaged with the past, and feel a voice of a former time period reach through and reassure you in your present world, cheering you up in your current circumstance, you can really become nostalgic for a time period you were never part of.
The innocence of the late nineteenth century, in rural southern America (politely disregarding the malicious racism for a literary experience), I love Twain’s unapologetic individuality. He’s deliberately teasing our notion of what literature is supposed to do. The children’s, magical world he describes is accurate to all generations of children, playing pretend. Acting as pirates, or playing cops and robbers, or having superstitious rituals and “voodoo” magic; that moment before you really learn how the world works, and are still filling in all the blanks with your imagination.
It’s sometimes important to think of a work as published in its time period, and what other genres it may have competed with at the time period. Children’s literature nowadays is a popular genre, with its own industry almost, due to how much money there is in it, but I’m thinking about a time period where an entire book dedicated to a childhood experience, told from the eyes of a kid, or a gang of kids, was probably a wildly new and innovative idea. Back in those days, it seems like most publishers would have thought that a child as the centerpiece of a narrative would not have offered enough stamina or charisma for an entire book. Maybe there’s not enough going on in children’s lives to hold the attention of adult readers…
The Art Monk 