Thanks again to the editors of FLARE for selecting me as their Featured Artist in the Summer 2020 issue, and giving me the opportunity to respond to their interview questions.
How would you describe your style?
If by “style” you mean the overall effect/impact of a piece, there’s no one answer to that question. Usually I don’t think too much (if at all) about what a piece is going to be and instead simply let it happen. I have a lot of different “looks” to my pieces, each of which is determined largely by the medium rather than any other conscious choices on my part.
For example, I have a “cartoony” style that usually arises from the crayons and/or pens I use to first enter into that particular world—inhabited by big headed fellows, dogs, and pitiful children, say. Black and white lines, thin and fat. These are still the basic tools of the trade for me.
But then I have a lot of other pieces that have a “smooth” look to them, and that’s in large part because of how the crayons, oils, and watercolors flow onto the pages. These are good for bodies and dreams, of course. Then there’s a “cozmic” look to some of the pieces, in which shapes and colors seem to predominate over anything else…at least until they form themselves into something that begins to speak to me.
What can I say? Maybe that all the old hippie shit is true— we’re all just loose collections of trembling atoms and the universe just flows through us.
Where do you find inspiration?
Most reasonable people know the answer to that one is everywhere, all the time, from anything. There’s the famous quote that goes along the lines of “if you’re feeling uninspired, don’t blame the world; blame how you’re looking at it.” If we’re open to the universe, there’s always something speaking or singing out there…something that gets us out of our small and egocentric heads.
More specifically, I totally dig the weird bric-a-brac you sometimes find in thrift stores—metal musician figurines made of wire and railroad spikes, say, or a set of hand-painted ceramic bald and creepy faced fat kids. Sometimes (too often, I know) I buy these trinkets--like Conestoga wagon salt and pepper shakers, or a flute-playing Guatemalan tree frog or a politically incorrect ashtray from the 1950’s--and set them all up together on my windowsills. Gradually, if I pay attention to the collisions of images and idea—and of course the way the light strikes this landscape at different times of day--then stories come streaming forth…often too many for me to capture.
Then, of course, there is walking…I recommend walking as often and as far as possible.
What advice would you give aspiring artists?
Just do the work. Keep on doing the work no matter what. Every single day if you can. I used to tell my students that “a writer is a person who writes” and when that person isn’t writing he or she is something else. The same holds true no matter the medium someone is working in, so I don’t call myself an “artist” unless I am making art. I avoid labels of all sorts as much as possible. Other people will label and judge us enough so we don’t have to help. We just need to keep doing it regardless of what others term failure or success. What happens to a piece after it is done means less than the fact that we must keep on with the making of another one because it is the making of it that matters—an act of resistance against a world that, as e.e. cummings so eloquently said, “trying its best day and night to make you into everybody else.” And, like most true acts, that isn’t easy.
What is the most surprising thing that making art has taught you?
Maybe not surprising as much as recognizing how important making art is. It is something that human beings must do to stay whole and alive. It doesn’t matter what kind of art we make, as long as we are doing that consistently. The need to do so is embedded in our DNA. Like so much else these days, though, we leave it to the “experts”—at the risk of our own destruction. We also don’t like to do it because to do it well is often difficult. But when we’re kids, we’re all creating, all the time. Then we “grow up” and adults, institutions, culture—all those powers that be—we let them get inside us and make us stop until the only thing we seem able to do is consume.
Like I said earlier—art in this sense is an act of resistance. People can join a thousand groups, but in the end only the self can answer the question: what can I make today? And then follow through with the doing, always the doing…
Could you speak to the relationship between digital and traditional media?
Working in digital media is simultaneously both more frustrating and more liberating when compared to working in more tangible mediums. I work in both kinds and have more to say about this relationship and in the comix piece I’ve posted on my Works page called “When It Comes to Making Comix.” In fact, I’m still trying to figure out some of the nuances that go on when what we are creating is always intangible—made on the screen for viewing on the screen. Anyway, I like digital media for a lot of reasons--not the least being a) it’s more forgiving, and b) you don’t have to wait for paint to dry.