(mellow music) The way I work, style, I guess, I am aware that it does turn people off.

But I think they're not looking with open eyes.

My name's Christian Hamrick, and I make artwork, mostly paintings, here in Eufaula.

Yeah, my mom let us paint on the floors and the walls.

We grew up without a TV.

She was trying to keep us busy and out of trouble, I guess.

When you're younger, you're not really thinking about, "I'm making art," you know?

You're just doing it.

You're just, you know, expressing yourself freely.

The more and more I make art, the more and more I realize that that's what I'm always trying to get back to for sure.

When you grow up, you have rules, and your creativity changes.

And you know, as an artist, you're always trying to get back to being a child, I think.

(mellow music) This is a place where even still people don't really understand that being an artist is a career.

Definitely a lot of people made sure to tell me that growing up.

I was good at science and math, so I, you know, was told to study engineering.

And I was painting the whole time, but I definitely was not like, "Oh, I should pursue painting."

I was living in a warehouse in Opelika for, I'd been there for a couple years.

And I was making all these works, like hundreds of works.

And that's when I decided, oh, I'm gonna stop doing the engineering thing and just focus on creating.

A lot of my work is playful, I guess childish, and seemingly naive.

I don't think it is naive.

I like for it to be disarming in a way.

People ask me if I consider myself an outsider artist or if I'm self-taught, you know, 'cause a lot of the work is like, I guess, primitive-leaning, people say.

But a lot of that is intentional, and it's a way to work really freely if I don't have to think about all these rules and expectations of, you know, the Western art canon.

(mellow music) So one of my big influences, I guess, is Dr. Seuss.

I've just always been interested in the worlds that can be created.

The first book we've done is called "Dear Someone," and it came from an animation, a paper cut animation I did, which was written to be a poem as part of a book, but then ended up being an animation because it kind of just unfolded that way.

And then now it's a book.

So just came from... Just, people do all sorts of things, and so like somewhere someone's climbing a tree, someone somewhere's getting rained on, someone's covered in bugs.

I have two brothers.

We were always kind of wrestling, and so they're kind of acrobats.

Yeah, those three characters definitely came from memory of that.

The animation and the poem in the book is about how connected we are and that you're never really alone, that someone's always thinking about you.

And we have a 4-year-old now, so he is, you know, he is my mentor, he is my art professor.

He is kind of easing into art-making.

He's into vacuum cleaners.

That's his passion.

So he will draw and paint.

We've got plenty of vacuum drawings.

He's got some drawings on the doors and some of the walls, yeah.

You know, I keep doing it, I think, because it is about the process and it is about the act of creating, using your mind and your hands.

I mean, I think, we're human beings, we have to use our minds.

So the process is very fulfilling and very much important, more so than the resulting work.

Even though the work is the goal, you know, it's one of those funny things where you hope it never ends, you know, you hope you're never really done.

(mellow music)