Chad Coombs is an artist who has never been able to separate the making from living. For him, art is not a choice, not a performance, but a survival mechanism. It is an ongoing conversation with fear, chaos, tenderness, and the landscapes, both natural and human-made that surround him. His practice spans photography, collage, painting, and single-line drawing, but at its core is a need to translate an interior world that often feels overwhelming into something visible, tangible, and shareable.

Chad’s art is not tidy, nor is it meant to be. It is raw, restless, and alive, an honest reflection of someone navigating fear, and survival while refusing to be defined by any one medium, diagnosis, or expectation. His work offers no easy answers, only invitations: to pause, to witness, to feel, and perhaps to see a part of yourself reflected in his authentic visual creations.

In a world where visual culture is saturated with polished perfection and performative vulnerability, Chad disrupts the frame, literally and figuratively. His analog photography, in particular, resists simple categorization. Part visual provocation, part philosophical excavation, his Polaroids, collages, and hand-drawn works are tools for exploration, not aesthetic affectations. They are born from a desire to ask questions rather than provide answers, to excavate truths that lie beneath the surface of the expected and the acceptable.

Anchored in his lived experience, Chad’s perspective is uniquely shaped by autism, a lens through which he sees the world in clarity and contradiction. It is not a limitation, but a method of inquiry that strips away social performance, forcing him to confront reality in its rawest form. His portraits and collages confront rather than comfort, revealing fractured faces, distorted ideals, and the artifice of cultural expectations. Yet beneath the disruption runs a tenderness and a yearning for truth, a care for what is seen and what is understood.

What distinguishes Chad’s practice is his insistence on the tactile and immediate. Whether working with Polaroid film, ink, brush, or paint, the imperfections of the medium become inseparable from the message, emphasizing that meaning and beauty exist not in the polished or perfected, but in the unresolved, the unguarded, and the real.

In every piece, whether drawn, photographed, or collaged, Chad invites the viewer into his ongoing dialogue with the world, a space that is honest, complex, and alive.