Senior Story Presnell loves the macabre

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Samuel Abourezk, Staff Writer

His favorite TV show is Twin Peaks, and his favorite album, Deathconsciousness. He admires filmmaker David Lynch, but admits that he couldn’t finish Eraserhead, saying that “… that movie feels like it’s three hours long. There’s no talking for the first 15 minutes.”

During the pandemic, Presnell painted, read Junji Ito books and started Cowboy Bebop. His passions are found in drawing and painting. He likes acrylic on canvas. Presnell says, “My whole life I’ve been drawing, never good until recently.” 

Some of his work goes onto the online marketplace Redbubble, where he sells t-shirts and stickers of “weird faces” and with “creepy looking stuff.”  Presnell likes to be made to feel uncomfortable by art, and he likes to create art that causes uncomfortability. He says that “the motive of making people uncomfortable is so cool.” The people who like uncomfortable art “really like it, and they enjoy it,” though he thinks that it is largely underrated. He watches many horror movies and is drawn to dark music; he likes to become uncomfortable, and then, to overcome it. 

He finds that school policy keeps him from actualizing his creative vision in painting. Gruesome things are what he loves to create, and are what he consumes. He feels that he isn’t able to satiate his appetite for creativity at school, a place where rules tie him down. “I do think that policy limits creative freedoms,” Presnell says. “I think that that’s been a thing in LPS for a while, making people stick to a certain subject in their painting.” 

Presnell draws a lot of teeth and “spooky stuff: little creepy gremlins.” He could never finish TV shows, he turned 18 a few weeks ago, and one of his items on Redbubble is a hand coming through a paper holding a cigarette. He will always remember when he saw Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at a concert, and when Starr forgot the lyrics to “Yellow Submarine.”