Romeo Alaeff

Romeo Doron Alaeff (born 1970 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American visual artist, filmmaker, author, and animation and film editor. He is also the founder and Editor in Chief of Lines & Marks, an interview magazine, blog, and community dedicated to drawing.

Career

Education Originally studying biomedical engineering, Alaeff received a Master of Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1996 and a BA from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1993.

Art Alaeff's art work has been described as "blurring the boundaries between icon and art, funny and serious, traditional and experimental, public and private,"

Alaeff published I'll be Dead by the Time You Read This: The Existential Life of Animals in 2017.

A sticker campaign was also launched from the original Evolution of Despair drawings and is featured in the book and exhibition tour, Stuck-up Piece of Crap: Stickers: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art.

Some of Alaeff's work doesn't employ humor directly but is trained on social, psychological, or philosophical observations, such as bias in perception in his "socially and politically charged," "multicultural, complexly encoded" War on the Brain series, which consists of "gorgeously revamped Rorschach blots containing references to conflicts from William Wallace and All That to the Smell of Napalm in the morning in Vietnam." Other themes include choice, as in The Tyranny of Small Decisions, or the act of crying as a manipulative device in human discourse as well as in filmmaking. In this project, Alaeff asked different musicians Strings and Moby to score the same 4 minute video of a young girl crying (singer Suzanne Santo of Honey Honey ) which was then played in a loop such that each viewer had a different experience of the piece such as "pathos, anxiety, pity and, in our attempt to give meaning to such seemingly unmediated emotion, an imagined internal narrative of heartbreak at the end of summer or an accident on the highway." begun in 1994 and spanning 16 years, which is devoted to Alaeff's "idiosyncratic, exuberantly complicated relatives."