Stephon Doby: Worlds in Tension

Stephon Doby (b. 1989) is a Chicago-based artist whose drawings and paintings navigate the emotional terrain between adolescence, identity, media culture, and philosophy. With an eye trained on both memory and the modern zeitgeist, Doby synthesizes influences ranging from anime and high-school social dynamics to vintage magazines, existential literature, and the chaos of daily city life. What emerges is a body of work that balances irony and sincerity, humor and heaviness, pop culture and introspection; an approach that has come to define his practice since joining Project Onward in 2010.

Working across comic illustration, collage, and acrylic painting, Doby treats his characters with the drama and pacing of reality-show participants: poised between moments, suspended in anticipation, steeped in atmosphere. These narrative scenes often feel as though the action has just happened or as if something is about to unfold, allowing tension and emotional charge to accumulate in the stillness. His interest in names, personalities, and the performative aspects of social roles reflects both his extroverted memory for people and a deeper fascination with the mechanics of identity formation.

"Mirror Mirror" by Stephon Doby

Doby’s visual language draws heavily from anime, hentai, YouTube culture, and fan-fiction aesthetics, yet he rarely reproduces motifs directly. Instead, he recomposes these sources into hybrid narratives that speak to broader questions about social expectation, desire, and belonging. His collage practice, developed from vintage Life magazines, children’s books, comics, and found printed media, pushes this further. He describes the process as “a puzzle of my own making,” one that allows pop-cultural fragments to collide with philosophical inquiry, historical imagery, and deeply personal struggles. In these works, irony is ever-present, but not as a coping mechanism. Rather, Doby views humor as a bridge to connection, a way to bring others into life-affirming conversations even when the themes grow dark.

In painting, his technique of layering translucent acrylics introduces controlled chaos. Influenced early on by the unpredictable blurring of foam brushes, Doby has maintained a commitment to the “orchestrated accident": an improvisational method where intuition and material behavior guide the direction of each piece. He describes his practice as a balancing act between composition and unpredictability, a tension heightened by years spent drawing on the bus, where bumps in the road became collaborators. His works explore the complexities of selfhood, mortality, medication, mental illness, and the fragile humor that threads through all existential questioning. “If I could articulate these feelings in words,” he says, “I would write an essay. But painting says it better.”

"Fair, French and Deadly" by Stephon Doby

Doby’s influences are as varied as his visual output: the conceptual clarity of John Baldessari, whose work first convinced him that fine art could engage with popular culture without hierarchy; the uncanny everydayness of Kafka; the fearlessness of 1950s EC Comics; and the childlike boldness of André Butzer. These references, mixed with his own history, drawing during the isolation of the pandemic, discovering painting during depression, finding community in shared cultural narratives, which have shaped a practice that is both deeply personal and intellectually agile.

Currently attending Malcolm X College with plans to become an animator, Doby continues to expand the boundaries of his work, pushing his characters into new emotional and conceptual terrain. What remains constant is his commitment to using art as a site of thinking, a place where questions about self, society, media, and mortality can coexist with play, absurdity, and connection.

In all its forms, Doby’s work challenges viewers to reconsider what counts as serious art, what counts as meaningful narrative, and how the aesthetics of youth culture can carry the weight of adult reflection. His images may appear humorous or naïve at first glance, but beneath the surface lies a sophisticated investigation of what it means to grow up, take stock of a complicated world, and still choose to see it with curiosity and openness.