Other World was never the kid who could look at something and draw it. He was better at it than most kids, but replication wasn't his forte. So he drew cartoons.

"Cartoons were sort of this open box of imagination," he says, "where you could just draw whatever you want because it's coming from your imagination. It's not really rooted in reality." Realism traps you in the chase for accuracy. Cartoons let you build a style nobody can grade you against.

He was into Ed, Edd n Eddy and Dexter's Lab, the second one a cartoon about experiments, and he was a science kid.

What he drew fell into two piles, funny scenes and, as a teenager with Call of Duty and Battlefield in his life, war and violence. His parents kept some of it, and he can see the split continuing: his art now is violent and joking at once, facetious is his word. Twenty years later the two piles have become one drawing.

Other World is Armenian, born in the US and raised around LA.

There was music in the house, in the way that means someone else chose it. He took violin for six years, kindergarten through sixth grade, and never wanted to. "It was not my choice. I never said I want to play the violin," he says. "I think it was my dad's dream for me to be a violinist for some reason. Like, what kind of dream? What is that?"

His mother's art he understood better. She recreated famous classical paintings in crochet, and they hung on the walls all through the house, old masters translated into yarn, which is a fair description of what he does now. His father's art he only found recently. He'd stopped years ago after he lost his art to the 1988 earthquake in Armenia. He picked it back up after retiring, after watching his son's career.

Other World’s only formal training was an after-school painting class, two hours a week. He learned to oil paint, then quit in under a year. It made art feel like work.

He went into science, deep. Biomedical engineering, all the way through a PhD.

Art fell by the wayside for four years, from the end of high school through most of undergrad. No time. When it came back it was acrylic paintings of funny and trippy things, some still at the bottom of his Instagram. He tried digital art then and disliked it, and can name why now: "I approached it the same way I was making physical art."

Then the lockdowns, mid grad-school. He'd been percolating an idea for a clothing brand and registered an Instagram under the name Other world to hold it. What went up instead was collage, built on an iPad, cut and pasted with minimal illustration on top, X eyes and halos.

The appeal was the pace. His day job was long experiments with results arriving in months or years, very, very delayed gratification in his words. Digital collage gave him a finished piece in a day. "I would listen to music and base a piece off of a song or a feeling or a lyric," he says. "It was something I would look forward to all the time."

The clothing brand never launched. He finished the doctorate and went full-time as an artist in the same season, two years ago.

The account grew, and he reached a verdict on his own work that most artists avoid.

"The art I was making was very good for social media and just looking at it quickly," he says, "but I didn't really see a lot of them as museum or gallery material."

So he slowed down and developed characters. That decision produced the fiends, mid-to-late 2020, in most of his work since. They're hooded and cloaked and brightly colored, faces and hands and feet showing. "They sort of resemble the dark but natural side of humans," he says. Mischievous, violent, selfish, "all the seven sins in a way."

A few characters have become specific, like the King of Nothing, standalone before his Garden of Otherworldly Delights. Most stay interchangeable. Pressed on what else they mean, he declines to oversell them.

"I don't know too much about them, honestly. I just like how they look, feel, and what they represent to me."

A piece starts by scouring for source material, old paintings that resonate. One or two become the foundation and the rest gets built around them. Sometimes he blends the seams until the scene reads as one image, sometimes he leaves them visible. Then illustration goes on top, and the real move happens: he takes the stories already inside those paintings and changes what they mean.

Balance is where the two halves of him meet, and he doesn't measure.

"If I have a character that's on one side, I might have a piece of, I don't know, like a stone on the other side that sort of balances it, but they're completely two different things. Or there might be fire on the other side that balances out the burst of color."

What he's after is an asymmetric, chaotic balance, achieved by eye. He also thinks art is more objective than artists admit, that there's real science behind what catches the eye and which colors agree. But he won't pull out a grid to check the rule of thirds, because the sensation of rightness is itself the evidence.

"The logical explanation for why a piece might be appealing is simply that people feel something significant when they look at it."

Told that his life runs through the most objective way of understanding people and the most subjective one at once, he took a second with it. "I've never put it that way, but I think that makes a lot of sense."

Underneath the fiends is a worldview he states precisely.

Humans, in his view, are a force of nature, capable of the best things imaginable and the worst, all of it natural. The mechanism is deterministic physics, which he calls "sort of the scientific explanation of destiny."

People hear that as pessimism. It isn't. "It's just the way things are, and that brings me comfort to know this is how things are."

The same instinct pulled him into science: zoom in far enough on the simplest thing and understanding runs out. "It's a never ending puzzle."

He was raised Christian without much churchgoing, never read the Bible, went through a stretch of nearly not believing, then settled into a version that works for him, with more faith in recent years, not less. His read is that religions arrived at things like the seven sins through accumulated experience rather than experiment, and that science tends to agree. Pride, his example, isn't the problem. Excess is, thinking you're better than everyone else, which leads to the rest.

Which is the thing people get wrong about his work.

"A lot of people look at my art and they might be like, oh, this is demonic, you must not believe in God at all. But that's not true."

Lately he's off his phone, working every day and posting almost none of it. People message asking whether he's still an artist. He is. A generative project called Machina, built on evolution, destiny, and patterns that repeat from cells to cities, arrives later this year.

Paradis, a French duo, and their album Recto Verso from 2016, recently remastered for its tenth anniversary. He doesn't speak French. It's probably his favorite record anyway, and the same song can land relaxing or intense depending on your mood.

Ex Machina, which he rewatched recently and found more relevant now than when it came out, and which gave the new project its name.

And Joey's in downtown Los Angeles. Order the hibachi wings, and ask for the tarragon aioli.