As a concept illustrator my focus is on realistic yet imaginative hand-rendered architectural and botanical drawing. My goal is to help provide you with a clean, articulate yet humanizing foundation for your project no matter how humble or grandiose. Whether it’s for a project proposal, editorial, marketing campaign or bringing a blueprint-schematics to life I can help you develop a look and feel that best communicates your ideas that will get your project funded and completed. Lets expand our thinking together! My clients have included the National Aquarium, The New School, NYC, The National Children's Museum, PwC and Wallpaper*, among others. Architectural illustration has been my career for the past 15 years and I love what I do. It has been a joy to be able to bring my studio art expertise into a collaborative realm. My attention to detail has been at least partially influenced by my 10yr stint meticulously restoring vintage turn-of-the-century posters.  

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Alyssa Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist, Earth activist, educator and clinical herbalist cultivating a small herbal sanctuary in Baltimore City. In addition to a BFA from the Maryland Institute Collage of Art and an MFA from Tulane University, she completed a three-year advanced training in medical herbalism at Arbor Vitae School of Traditional Herbalism, has studied indigenous Amazonian plant medicine, and obtained certificates in permaculture design and straw bale and adobe building. From 2002 to 2007 she worked on multiple straw bale and green roof construction projects among other environmentally sustainable efforts, which continue to be a significant influence for the work she does today. For the past 20 plus years, she has garnered many gallery exhibitions, awards and residencies while expanding her studio practice into the collaborative realm to do concept illustration for internationally recognized organizations focused on ecosystem education and design. In 2004 she co-founded Current Space, an artist-run community art gallery and performance venue. In 2016 she founded an environmental literacy venture called Eclipta Herbal. She is passionately dedicated to endeavors that promote ecological mutualism with all living beings. 

 

My work combines drawing, sculptural installation and the social/environmental practice of herbalism to investigate themes of ecosystem sustainability within the manufactured landscapes of the built environment. My focus is to question modern architecture and the modern mind-set by depicting a hybridization of overlapping structures that consider intersecting and deviating lines between protection, dominion and symbiosis. What are the ways in which conventional forms of building and automated convenience keep us compartmentalized within a dangerously abstracted relationship with nature and our own bodies? How do we have agency within these fixed monuments of permanence? Who are the players and what are the means for reclaiming non-human kinships? Like a seed, one or two marks on paper slowly germinate out in all directions leaving the demarcations between inside and outside space ambiguous. The presence of the occasional plant or animal serves as a reminder that human made structures have displaced these species yet their ghosts graze on another “plane” just beneath our feet. The placement of certain mundane elements takes on a mythic presence alluding to a time when dwellings were tools for connecting to and understanding elemental and celestial phenomenon. Images of modern material culture, such as used tires or reclaimed Plexiglas, point to the failures of capitalism, colonial ideas of “progress” and dead-end systems of waste. Billboards fashioned as chalkboards advertise a new form of learning as these living systems restructure themselves toward a new beginning.

 

My drawings are produced with a scientific meticulousness, that can at any moment, be intuitively erased, scraped or layered into forms of suspension and modularity. Like schematics of an archeological excavation, these tectonic forms hang in transparent layers of memory of pre- and post-industrial time. Amid the dusty, pastel hues of dawn or dusk, these dream-like settings of place and non-place wax and wane within a process state between construction, creation or assembly, and decomposition, demolition or decay. Much like a set of child’s building blocks, they are always vulnerable to rearrangement.

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I look forward to hearing about your project!