In & Around Design: Kestin Cornwall

Kestin Cornwall grew up in the Windsor Ontario area. His father is Grenadian and his mother is American, he spent much of his youth in Detroit Michigan with family. In 2001 he moved to Oakville, Ontario to begin his training at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. While completing the Art Fundamentals and Illustration programs, Cornwall’s focus and love for the arts grew quickly. He increasingly combined both classical drawing and painting with modern digital reproduction and screen-printing. Over the past ten years, Cornwall has focused on creating relevant progressive art. He has used a varied practice of combining hand drawings, digitally removing the human hand and then forcing the element of the human hand back into the work. Cornwall uses images to explore the notion that culture, entertainment including film and other media, shape the mass public perception of black people and people of colour in North American culture. Cornwall critically charts current political, social, and economic landscapes with compositions brimming with references to media, popular culture, music, and art history. He enjoys challenging what’s considered “common” and feels it is the duty of an artist to add beauty to the world while invoking the unending social responsibility to capture thought. Many of his influences include contemporary graphic realism, street art and old comics, with a complimenting factor of mystery, often mirroring timeless depictions of pop culture. Each piece depicts an analysis of our obsession with beauty, age and change. Kestin Cornwall lives and works in Toronto. For more information, visit Kestin's website or Instagram.