Pen & Paper: Zio Ziegler

California-based artist Zio Ziegler is known for his complex, large-scale graffiti-styled murals that often hold symbolic undertones. For this installment, we caught up with Ziegler for our latest Pen & Paper feature at his studio in Mill Valley, California.

Ziegler’s motifs are derived from an upbringing surrounded by the American outdoors and his parents’ extensive collection of Aboriginal sculptures and African masks. His portfolio includes commercial work for Google, Lyft and Facebook, a cover for Architectural Design, and a collaborative sneaker collection with Vans. Yet in this segment, we explore the darker ideas that rarely leave his sketchbook.

Having almost every inch of the canvas covered, the works presented here show Ziegler to wholly embrace the use of contour lines. Intricate designs and textured patterns flow to make bodies and faces belonging to cryptic characters. Fluid lines play with perspective, and as it seems, the only thing that stops them from unwinding and undulating out of the paper are the neat borders that frame each page.

Bold black tracks run into zigzags, while fine hatching details add shading and depth. Ziegler’s art has a certain element of the grotesque, with skull, bones, bird and reptilian motifs being interlaced throughout. One of the most intricate submissions to date, Ziegler rounds out the collection with a unique interpretation of the HYPEBEAST logo, where surrealist faces, tribal masks and lettering are intertwined to present an absurd narrative only he understands.