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Bones Gilmore is a post-internet folk artist creating allegorical figurative drawings which deal with emotional and spiritual themes like love, pain, and surrender. His art practice is daily and devotional, working primarily on 14×19″ panels of medium-density fiberboard with a limited palette of colored pencils and graphite.
He studied art at Bard College, where he was held back for a year, graduating in 2022. Working out of his home studio in Ridgewood, Queens, Bones has made a fulltime job of drawing, selling artwork through his Instagram page @b0nezone.
Drawing inspiration from anime, memes, renaissance art, sports, and religious iconography, Bones has developed a distinct style and visual language which describe hyperbolic versions of his spirit and experience. With varying degrees of intention all of his artwork is self-portraiture.
Hi Bones! It’s a pleasure to sit down with you! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in Ridgewood?
Hi Rubén! On a normal day I wake up pretty early and I have a cigarette and coffee. My bedroom and studio are the same place so I go in there and draw. I’m excited to draw every day and many days I wake up smiling. I put my headphones on too. I like to draw upon awakening because my head is clear and nothing has happened yet. I usually wake up with a couple ideas, the feeling to make them is intense and I try to be an honest channel.
I stop drawing usually after I have made one or two physical artworks, and after that I have many random responsibilities so I attend to them. I walk an extreme amount, I will walk anywhere. I play video games like a second job. I also use instagram, I need to go on there to share my work and try to get money. It makes me insane but I like it too! I often make drawings on my iPad for a few hours. I have friends too who I love to see, but I lean toward isolation and I’m happy to be alone most of the time. Every day is like this so I have a lot of good days.
I’m curious, growing up in Brewster, what was life like there? And what kind of kid were you? What did you enjoy doing?
Bones: Life was good! My parents are loving and nurturing, I had friends, it is a place surrounded by the beach. I was an emotional and creative kid, I got depressed when I was young because of my brain but I don’t blame anything for that. I was making things pretty constantly and I filled a lot of sketchbooks. In high school I had a business making necklaces that I called relics, I used the money to buy pot and Magic: The Gathering cards. I skateboarded a lot but I couldn’t land tricks.
Is Bones your real name?
Bones: In 2017 I was really needing to change my identity. When I went to college I introduced myself to everyone as Bones because I wanted more attention than I was getting, and it totally worked. I nuked my birth name off the Earth. At that time I came out as nonbinary, and later as transgender, I was on a big quest to define myself. I’ve circled back to being a guy but all of it is important. My dad worked on a whalewatching boat when I was growing up and there was a captain named Joe Bones. I got some inspiration from him. Today it is the only name people call me, I’ve been Bones for almost a decade.
You’ve said SpongeBob and Simpsons drawing books helped teach you how to draw. Do you remember what felt exciting about copying those images as a kid?
Bones: Yes, I was like 8 years old and I had a white-light experience learning to draw Homer Simpson. Drawing an accurate likeness of Homer was really thrilling, it taught me a lot about seeing and understanding. I probably drew Homer 1,000 times in elementary school. He’s a really simple character and SpongeBob is too, and they’re also easy to draw incorrectly, and I liked to distort them. Like drawing a really wide Homer.
With that in mind, do you remember approximately at what age your creative side started to show? And when did you start taking being an artist seriously?
Bones: My parents were giving me crayons and paper before I could talk so it has been my whole life. I started wanting to be a famous artist in probably third grade. It’s funny because at that age I only knew about like Picasso, who I don’t even fuck with, but that’s where I was at. I am interested in stability instead of fame now.
I was getting pretty good at art in high school and then I studied it in college. It’s a crazy decision to drop so much money on drawing classes but my financial aid package was great and I feel like my career justifies that choice. I went to Bard College which is like a weird pressure cooker for the mentally ill and it definitely shaped me as an artist. After living in New York City for a couple years I decided I don’t like working for people and needed to lock in so I did. That was at the end of 2024 and I have been living off my drawings since then.
You mentioned Tumblr’s influence on your life around 2011–12. Can you elaborate on that. What did Tumblr teach you about image-making, taste, or identity?
Bones: I was seeing other teenagers do heroin on there! I guess I had a digital camera/cursed aesthetic blog, it was like time-stamped flash photos of dead fish and machinery and guns and porn. It was a pretty abject part of the internet and I was 13, I was super impressionable and running this blog felt like an edgy and ultra-cool extension of me. Many of my sensibilities come from Tumblr. It definitely inspired a strong desire to get and use drugs, which was destructive but formative and necessary for growing up.
Posting was a way for me to develop my identity and form a picture of myself. I was taking and posting photos of myself covered in a nosebleed, or eating bugs, or posing with knives, all of this quirky stuff. My classmates at school would talk about it like I was a freak and I really enjoyed that reputation. It helped form a daily habit around publishing my life to the internet, like hold on let me make this public. Which is neither good nor bad. I can’t believe I was allowed on there but I’m grateful I was! I deleted my blog in 2014 after a weird real-life breakup with one of my followers.
Your work seems to embrace memes and diagrams without irony. What is it about those formats that feels so natural or meaningful to you?
Bones: Irony is poison and authenticity is sacred, I think! There’s enough incenserity in the world, it’s courageous to be vulnerable and genuine about your experience. I believe memes, or more generally pictures with words, are the standard communication system of this age. And they trend toward irony. I look at them every day and they make me laugh and they structure my thinking. A meme everyone has seen becomes a part of the common language, they’re like idioms, internet culture is just culture now.
Appropriating meme templates and phrasing into my drawings adds a layer of identification and familiarity, like, woah I know what you’re referencing! But the drawings are about vague spiritual principles, and my feelings. So it’s both recognizable and esoteric, a combination I am really interested in.
A lot of people treat internet culture as disposable, but you seem to find genuine emotional or spiritual potential in it. What do you think people miss when they dismiss those forms?
Bones: I don’t know exactly what internet culture is, because everything is on the internet, but I see things on my phone that totally reshape my brain. A couple years ago I saw a screenshot of a Twitter spambot DM which read,
‘Hey, I am kinda interested in everything that is unknown to me. 🤔’.
I was moved by the context and sentiment and phrasing and I think of it every time I feel curious, so every day. The post is now buried under billions of others but the personal impact is real, it’s like scripture to me. Amidst the slop there are so many images that have a lasting and profound effect. Many people are sharing messages that carry depth and weight on the computer and it is beautiful to me, I hope to do that too.
You said you love explaining things. Does making art sometimes feel less like self-expression and more like trying to transmit a truth clearly?
Bones: I do love explaining things, and I love language and symbols. But also in my art I am usually trying to explain things which don’t have a single meaning, or are totally inexplicable. I make a lot of pictures about my feelings, and I have bipolar, which is a very nonsensical illness. How do I show you I am scared and happy all at once? I also love God but I have no clue what it is — in that case ambiguity and vagueness are actually specific.
You describe your art as being about the mortal coil, but also about levity and hope. How do those ideas coexist for you?
Bones: The mortal coil is like the chaotic and disordered nature of life, like struggle and suffering. But also, levity and hope abound, and there’s more lightness than there is dark. I’m not an idealist, I think it’s honest and important to acknowledge pain, everybody feels it. Not everybody feels hope, so I want that to be the ultimate message my art carries.
You’ve said you want to make honest, beautiful images of what it feels like to be alive. What parts of being alive do you find hardest to represent honestly?
Bones: There’s a vibe of vastness to life that can’t be encompassed in a 14×19” drawing, but I want to capture it still. I find myself every day saying, “life is beautiful”, or funny, or crazy, because I don’t have better language for it. I heard we have 50,000 thoughts a day, every second of waking life is a new experience, there are infinite combinations of emotions, literally anything can happen. I can only show a tiny part of that at a time.
You speak about wanting to make work for people who believe in God or something bigger than themselves. What need in yourself is that project answering?
Bones: My drawings explore and describe my own relationship with God, spirituality, and life. Not everyone believes in God but I think everybody believes in something bigger than themselves, whether it’s a sports team or money or whatever, a place to put your faith. I think that is where a lot of identification happens – someone who has faith sees a picture of faith and feels more faith. That’s the function of iconography and devotional art. And that’s sort of how it works for me, making a picture about my faith gives it a shape and makes it stronger.
Was there a specific moment in your life when the search for something bigger than yourself became unavoidable?
Bones: I was going to die from drugs and alcohol in 2022 but I didn’t. That gave me a good reason to believe in God 😭It was an easy choice and life is good now, I’ve been sober four years and I’m standing on a totally different foundation.
You’ve described visiting Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden as a spiritual turning point. What did that experience unlock in you?
Bones: When I visited his house I was pretty lost – at that point I’d bought groceries and paid rent with drawings for two consecutive months, not quite long enough to call myself a fulltime artist, and I was facing a lot of uncertainty. People were telling me to get a job. Learning about his life and seeing his work totally changed my heart and I returned to my studio practice with way more faith. Every time I physically leave New York is like genesis too, so just being in Georgia was already doing a lot for me.
After that experience, did your relationship to making images change in a practical way, or more in an inner, psychological sense?
Bones: I definitely developed a new discipline around my practice and my production ramped up majorly. Psychologically I guess I felt like I had a new mission and feeling of purpose. I haven’t drawn too much visual inspiration from his work but we do both deal with similar divine imagery, like angels.
Do you think your work is trying to comfort people, guide people, or simply sit beside them in their uncertainty?
Bones: I mostly don’t make a drawing with an audience or objective in mind, I make them for and about myself, but the drawings do find their audience and it’s special. I receive a lot of messages from people telling me how a drawing has helped them. It’s an unreal and life-affirming experience to learn that someone in like, India, or Peru, saw my artwork and it moved them to enjoy life or believe in God again. That is something that seriously motivates me to continue making art, I don’t know how it will affect people but it does.
I know you’re big into gaming. What games are your all time favorites and why?
Bones: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is important to me. I love the music and peaceful atmosphere, and the way everything has a glow around it. My brother and I shared a save and played it a crazy amount. I also love Call of Duty, I’ve been playing it since I was like 7 years old, it feels so good to be good at that game! I am above average at quickscoping. CS:GO and Diablo 4 ate 4,000 hours of my life.
Do games influence the way you think about space, symbols, storytelling, or even spiritual experience?
Bones: I played the Dark Souls games last summer and the themes/style of my art became extremely desolate and gothic. I was totally engrossed, I listened to a lot of black metal, and on top of that I was depressed. Whatever I’m thinking about most is what shapes my work.
Also something happens where I’ll be focusing on a task and I’m simultaneously navigating a Call of Duty map in the back of my head. They’re like downloaded in my conscience and attached to other memories. Literally right now I’m mentally jumping around Overgrown from Call of Duty 4.
What role does music play in your process? Are there certain artists or albums that feel tied to your work?
Bones: If I’m awake I am listening to music. I’m a big listener, I like how music lets me choose what I feel and think about, it inspires my art more than anything else. I also primarily share my work through instagram which lets me put a song to my drawings, it’s a cool way to complete the feeling of an image and share what I’m listening to. I often hear a song and think, I need to make a picture that looks like how this sounds. 4-“Enduring Freedom” by Torture was the soundtrack for so many of my drawings, same with In The Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel.
And Talon of the Hawk by The Front Bottoms. My second ex-girlfriend showed me that album in 10th grade. There are months where I listen to it every day and it gets me through a lot of coloring, it’s cringey and I like to sing along and I think I sound just like him.
Do you think some of your sensibility was formed as much by subcultures and online communities as by art itself?
Bones: Definitely. Art inspires me formally, I see tons of artwork that I want to emulate and that motivates me to generate my own, but the internet and culture generally direct the substance and subject. I was just looking at the Italian painter Giorgione, which moved me to draw a squished picture of Goku contemplating the shape of a cloud. I’m a product of the media I consume.
Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Queens. How have those cities shaped different versions of you?
Bones: My best friend from school and an exceptionally great photographer, Walker Bankson, lives down in Atlanta with his awesome partner Madeline. It’s become a yearly tradition to visit them with my dear friend Rosemary Haynes, who is another insanely talented photographer, and our itinerary is always really unique and creative, so I have strong positive associations with the place. We eat crab straight off the table. Going there and playing with my artist friends resets me.
I spent a summer couchsurfing in Los Angeles, I was in active addiction and struggling mentally, and was sort of drifting around the place for a couple months. It’s a place I can go to in my mind, I wrote some really sad guitar songs about it. I recall drinking a few 40s by myself under the Santa Monica boardwalk and wondering why I was so lonely and selfish. That was in the lost years of my life and I’d like to return now and get a new relationship with the place.
Queens is where I live at, and it’s wonderful. I have awesome roommates, my neighborhood is quiet and beautiful, my bedroom is massive and perfect. I moved to this neighborhood in October and it has felt like a new phase of my life and career.
What has friendship taught you that art school or the art world never could?
Bones: Art school and the art world couldn’t teach me to love myself 😭. I don’t want to be loved for my art, but be loved for who I am. And my friends do that. I haven’t learned much from the art world, I am a reluctant and skeptical participant and I have encountered some snakes there. It has a vapid and capitalist aura and I’m grateful to my friends for reminding me truth and beauty are paramount.
Has moving through different places changed the kind of images you feel compelled to make?
Bones: Definitely. This question makes me think of Poughkeepsie, New York. I took a trip there to walk a personal marathon, I had this feeling it would be important. I saw every street and neighborhood in the city and downloaded it mentally, and when I came back to the studio the feeling of my drawings was totally changed. There’s deep beauty and sadness in Poughkeepsie, I wanted to channel it in my drawings. And this same thing is true for everywhere I go.
In your experience, can friendship be a spiritual force?
Bones: I think friendship is the spiritual force in a lot of ways. True friendship is a type of love which is enduring and unconditional, like God’s. Circumstances change and life moves me around so there are a lot of people I do not see or talk to often, but they’re part of me permanently. I believe God speaks to me through people, and especially through my buddies. But I’m also extremely bad at maintaining relationships so I wonder what that says about my spiritual health.
What do you fear most losing in yourself as you continue growing as an artist?
Bones: I strive to never take any of this for granted, so I think the fear is losing my gratitude. It’s the ultimate compliment to be told I am someone’s favorite artist and I don’t ever want to get used to that. Someone drove from Philly to see my show in New York, it is an incredible gift to have people love and connect with my art. I have sort of a perfect life which revolves around making pictures, and only two years ago that is all I dreamed about. I want to have a thankful heart all the time and never lose my feeling of amazement at all of this.
My technical ability has also improved a lot in the last year so image-making is much easier, but I hope to not lose the charm of confusion and effort. I love the look of trying hard to render something and still missing the mark, like a lopsided eye or a fucked up hand. I do a lot of that on purpose but earnestness is a tangible thing.
Do you think your work reveals things about you that are hard to say out loud in regular life?
Bones: I try hard to be honest and I’m often happy to be honest out loud, but there is stuff I can only say with drawings too. I’m also not very articulate in speaking, and sometimes fear blocks me, and I have brain damage. I don’t have access to my subconscience but it shows itself in my drawings. I generally don’t know what I think or feel, like I literally cannot see until I make a drawing, it is like a ouija board.
And it feels safer and less embarrassing to put my feelings into a picture than to say them out loud, even if the audience is tens of thousands of people. There’s an element of anonymity and detachment to it.
When you imagine the body of work you want to leave behind, what do you hope it proves or preserves?
Bones: I don’t like to think about dying but right now I hope my work helps people and makes them laugh. The body of work will probably prove I drew a lot of pictures and I would like to be remembered as someone that liked to draw.
Can you walk me through your creative process from beginning to end result?
Bones: When I am not at my desk I try to maximize my life experience and think hard about what is happening around/inside me, pray a lot, and have fun. That is where I get inspiration.
And when I am at my desk to make a physical art piece it is usually like this – I have some spiritual principles, quote, or aphorism I’m thinking about, and then I have feelings, and an idea of what kind of picture I want to make. An example of this is patience, joy, and horses, as a closeup portrait. I draw very fast and while I’m drawing I think of how to synthesize all these things. I usually keep the first lines I put and I endeavor to be loose and intuitive. This sometimes results in very stupid pictures. Somewhere in this process I add language to clarify the image. And then I color it in and call it done.
In my separate but related digital practice, I gather up thoughts and phrases in my notes app and then I blast them out as quickly as possible all at once. I work super fast on my iPad, I assemble the drawings out of stock photos, my camera roll, famous paintings and my brain. I trace so much. These drawings are typically more cryptic, literal, and silly than my traditional work, and deal with concepts that don’t feel strong enough for the time commitment of a physical drawing. There is a feeling of urgency, desperation and euphoria in this process, I have ideas faster than I can draw, it is a very manic experience. The digital concepts sometimes graduate to traditional when they feel right.
Can you also tell me about your use of symbolism?
Bones: I love apples and stigmata and the sun. Things hold so much power, every part of a picture is information. I also like how symbols can confuse an image too. I use them liberally to saturate a piece with meaning. I am pretty deliberate about which symbols I include in my work, I have a lot of personal rules for what goes where, and what things I wouldn’t draw a picture of.
How do you approach color?
Bones: I like Easter colors. I work only on wood, which has a tone and value. I choose lighter colors because I love how the darkness of the wood shows through them, it generates awesome depth and variance like a painting. My favorite colors to draw with are white, pink, blue, and yellow. The lines of my artwork take me an hour max and the rest of my day is spent coloring, it is 80% of my job, it is meditative but it is terrible on my hands. I press very hard.
So with what we just talked about, what are you hoping to convey?
Bones: I’m hoping to communicate my experience. I would like to transmit some universal truths with pictures that are unique to my life.
Ok Bones, now to something totally different. In a parallel universe who would you be? and what would you be doing?
Bones: Maybe I would be a monk or a dog. Or I would be a woman but everything else would be the same. I used to paint houses for work and I loved it so much, I imagine in another world I never made art and I kept painting houses forever.
Outside of art, what’s something you’re obsessed with right now, maybe a hobby, a show, or even a food—that keeps you grounded or inspired?
Bones: I’m seriously obsessed with this extraction shooter game called Marathon. The central game mechanics are loss and acceptance, and the progression is extremely slow. It is just like life. I play it with my artist friends Ryker Woodward and Matthew Bonneau.
I’ve also been deep into 60s-70s Cambodian music. It’s a combo of traditional folk and psychedelic rock, the sound is both contemporary and ancient. It’s characterized by a really distinct vocal style that I love, and I don’t understand the language so it doesn’t distract me while I’m working. Pol Pot kind of shut it down, I was wondering why the genre stopped abruptly in 1975. So I’ve been learning a lot about Cambodian history.
Lastly I am obsessed with long drive dashcam videos and train POVs on YouTube. There is a channel called Railway Relaxation. I can’t really watch movies, but looking out of the front of a train going through the forest puts me at total peace and I can look at it for a couple hours at once. It helps me think.
Can you tell me a story about a time when a connection with someone had a big impact on you?
Bones: When I first moved to New York City in 2022 I was newly sober, deeply agoraphobic, and I’d fallen out of touch with most of my friends. I met this dude Michael the first week I moved here and for the next six months he was kind of my only friend. He’s taught me a lot about life and God, he saved my life in many ways, and we still talk often to this day. The power of friendship.
What qualities do you find most important in the people you choose to spend time with?
Bones: I like people who are authentic, caring, grounded and considerate. I avoid association with people who are inconsiderate, cruel, or selfish. My friends are funny and creative and we are always laughing and making things.
Anybody you look up to?
Bones: I do not idolize people but I have some favorites.
What motivates you?
Bones: Love, devotion, God, fear, self, security, and pain are some motivators. There are thousands of other smaller things but those are big ones. I want to always be driven by a positive force but I am a fallible person.
How would you describe a perfect day?
Bones: The sun is out and I am not cold, coffee doesn’t make me sick or anxious, I make an exceptionally good drawing, I talk to a friend and I go for a walk. That sounds so good to me right now.
Alright Bones, I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
Bones: In high school I got stoned and watched The Labyrinth (1986) every night for a year straight, the one with David Bowie and the puppets. I was having some mental problems and decided I wanted to live in that movie because it is perfect. More recently Decision to Leave (2022) from Park Chan-Wook is my favorite because it’s the ultimate story about love.
The second is. What song(s) are you currently listening to the most right now?
Bones: I was listening to He Needs Me by Shelley Duvall from the live action Popeye movie soundtrack so much. It has an insane and devotional character to it, and I don’t like showtunes which is why I think it stuck so well. It’s like, blahhhh I’m crazy ;D vibes. Just Be Simple by Songs: Ohia has me in a chokehold. I play it 20 times every day and I sing along, it feels so good. Jason Molina is a tragic hero to me and I feel the slide guitar in my heart. He says, ‘this whole life has been about trying to be simple again’. That’s the truest thing I’ve heard.