“I think of my work as a type of visual psychodrama about the complexity of the modern world and it’s tendency toward existential crisis. I use the innate qualities of painting to explore and challenge ideas about human nature, as well as to highlight our inherent inability to cohabitate nicely. Recently, I’ve been interested in focusing on the preoccupations of modern people in contemporary entropic landscape environments. The recurring motifs relate to human desire: leisure activities, tourism, advertising, fashion and materialism, and sexuality. Meanwhile, there are many hints of darker human tendencies: violence, domination and conflict. These play out amidst backdrops of looming industrial infrastructure, explosions, smoke plumes and environmental disaster. Each painting has its own entropic reality where, by definition, the natural progression of a closed system is toward a more disordered state and never a more ordered one.

I've developed the aesthetics in my paintings in order to describe these conditions. The image compositions I need to make are layered and complex and for this I rely both on my drawing abilities and use of digital collage. I also seek to create a tension by juxtaposing contradictory images, and I often do so by scouring for reference material from a wide variety of sources. I like to combine highbrow sources like professionally photographed high resolution luxury product advertisements, with images from more low-brow sources like social media, news media, and even amateur pornography. Over the past couple of years I’ve begun using digital fabrication techniques as an important way to represent certain structures of the modern industrial world. For instance, "incoming signal", I've used a combination of plotter cut vinyl sticker and laser cut paper stencils to render the Green Bank Observatory Radio Telescope and for "frack-life", Troll A, an offshore oil drilling platform and the tallest structure in the world.”

Austin was raised in Idaho and was educated in the Pacific Northwest. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Western Washington University and earned his Master of Fine Arts from Washington State University. His achievements have been recognized with both state and national awards and he has exhibited his artwork internationally. A number of his artworks have been purchased by private collectors in the United States, Europe and Japan.