About the artist

I'm Roberto Cisneros — a contemporary surrealist artist, custom tattoo designer, and muralist working out of San Francisco's Mission District under the name Lost Soul Art Studio.

I didn't choose art. Art chose me — the way it chooses everyone who has no other way to survive.

I started as a professional ballet dancer. Michael Smuin hired me at eight years old — not as a student, as a performer. He wrote the ballet Pinocchio for me. Headlines from The San Francisco Chronicle titled the review 'A Young Star Is Born.' By fifteen, I was second in seniority in a company of dancers twice my age. Then addiction found me. It took everything — my career, my home, my sense of self. I was living on the streets of the same city that had once put my name in the newspaper.

I drew on sidewalks to survive. Original hand-drawn work, created wherever I could find a surface. One day a woman stopped to watch me draw, mind you I had no actual art materials, in fact I was using tanbark. She ended up setting down twenty dollars, and said: 'You should do this for a living.' A light bulb went off in my head... Lost Soul Art Studio was born right there — not in a building, but in a moment of grace on the pavement.

In 2018 I came home to San Francisco. Today, my work spans original acrylic paintings, watercolor fine art, ballpoint pen illustration, hand-drawn tattoo flash, large-scale murals, and digital art downloads. I create at the intersection of fine art and tattoo-ready design — dark surrealism, neon flash, figurative work, and conceptual pieces that have no place but on gallery walls and under skin alike.

Every piece I make is 100% original — never duplicated, never resold. Rooted in contemporary surrealism — dreamlike, psychological, and deeply personal. I think of myself as a butterfly soul — someone in constant metamorphosis.

Every line I draw carries the full weight of everything I've lived through. I make art because it kept my soul alive when nothing else could. And now I make it for you.

I am not a brand. I am a resurrection. Welcome to my studio... Roberto