High school years can be tough for any kid. All those changes happening in ourselves, in life. For Austin Rounds, high school could be especially challenging since he is on the autism spectrum. He discovered that his art was a good coping mechanism, helping him to deal with his emotions. Art was also his gift – to himself and to others. His father, Joe Rounds, became his business manager as Austin decided art would become his lifelong career.
“I want to say way back, when I was four or five, really young, I started scribbling pictures of bunnies and stuff like that,” Austin Rounds says. “I started to draw more than just bunnies when I went to kindergarten, first grade. By then I had a little sketchbook, and I would draw random stuff—Batman and stuff like that, maybe a picture of Sponge Bob, all kinds of things.”
It was when he began high school that Rounds, now in his 20s, felt that he wasn’t happy, perhaps a sense of not quite fitting in. Art taught him coping skills for his emotions.
“A lot of stuff was bothering me,” he recalls. He got interested in what other artists were doing, began studying their styles, even as he began developing his own. “I’ve always been a fan of scary stuff, creepy stuff, unnerving stuff, stuff that felt off.”
Rounds now works with different topics, often doing commission pieces for books, music albums, graphic novels, and comics. He illustrated Michigan Monsters and Macabre, Series Two by Wicked Harvest Books (2022), and he is currently at work of a book of his own.
Joe Rounds, Austin’s father, is his business manager. He helped his son open his own art business, Austin Rounds Gallery, upon graduation from high school.
“Austin works in multiple genres,” he says. “You’ll see his style, but it will morph… once we got his portfolio going with that first book, and he quickly built that up, we started exhibiting his work at Kalamazoo Art Council Art Hops.”
He has since exhibited his work also at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum, the State Theatre, and the Center for New Media.
To view Austin Rounds’ art, visit https://austinroundsgallery.com/
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