Cody Oyama’s body of work contains intense linework, abstraction of texture and surface, and conceptual sculptural drawings. Oyama states that he seeks a balance between “Apollonian and Dionysian ideals, the intellectual and the emotional.” His artwork renders this tension. Spending eight to one-hundred hours drafting, his linear drawings depict astute lines intersecting or running parallel; at times, his lines appear to repel each other producing an emotive surface. He draws with STAEDTLER, uni-Posca, Micron, and Prismacolor pens while using traditional drafting tools.

Textural and conceptual works are created with mirrored glass, latex paint, ink, acrylic, oil pigment, found object, collage, and 140-pound screen-printing or watercolor paper. Oyama’s abstraction refers to ephemeral moment and atmospheric depth. More conceptual pieces appear to allude to Suprematism, such as a black square painted on to a crumbling piece of cement. Oyama plays with scale in an attempt to reproduce a person’s impalpable emotional reaction to art.

Oyama lives and works out of New York City, and commonly completes work at Lower East Side Art Collective and Gallery Con Artist NYC. He was born in Hilo, HI, and raised in Charlotte, NC. During the years between 2006 and 2012, he studied at Idyllwild art academy, Idyllwild, CA; later, he was schooled at Liverpool Institute of the Performing Arts, Liverpool, UK from 2010 until 2011. Less than twenty years old, Oyama has participated in national shows.