About

I am Joshua Foster, the artist behind Ramen Shaman. My work comes out of whatever I am living through. Loss, pressure, change, rebuilding, the long stretch of staying alive when everything feels heavy. Painting and sculpture have always been the way I process things. Tattooing is the newest part of that language, a way of making those marks real on skin.

I make work that feels raw and direct because I am not interested in polishing myself into something I am not. My pieces grow the way real things grow. Layers, mistakes, shifts, the quiet parts I do not always talk about. I spend a lot of time watching paint dry and bleed, letting the piece breathe. It becomes something I am growing with, not something I am forcing.

Ramen Shaman started as a name and slowly became a world. The Spirits of the Shaman, the Fools, the Memory Reapers, all these figures came out of years of trying to make sense of myself and my surroundings. They are part myth, part grief, part survival. They show the parts of me that lived through things and kept going. Each piece is a marker from some chapter of my life.

Right now I am building out my studio space on Kenmore Blvd in Akron and giving myself room to work the way I always wanted to. Large walls, open tables, room for process. Some days I am painting. Some days I am sculpting. It is all connected. Everything I make comes from the same place.

I believe in presence over polish. I believe in slow growth. I believe in making work that is honest even when it is uncomfortable. My blog is where I share more of what is going on behind the scenes, the mess and the clarity, the days where things finally click.

If you take anything from my work, I hope it feels alive. I hope it feels like something that came from a real place. And if it connects with you, then we met in the middle for a moment, and that is enough.

Photos by Paige Marguiles