Mini interview

Every-so-often a student contacts me for a presentation they're doing on an artist. This is my little interview.

Blair: How did your interest in art start and form?

Jeremy: That's a tough question. I really don't remember because I've had a love for drawing since I was a small child. I think I showed talent from an early age, and I started to do it more and more because of the positive responses I would get. I remember once in kindergarten a kid drew Garfield on the chalk board, and I was so jealous. I've always been incredibly competitive about my drawing skills, so whenever I saw a drawing that I thought was better than something I could do, I would go into a drawing fury for days, or be totally crushed if it was well out of my league. I still do that sometimes.

Blair: What are some of your objectives or purposes for your art?

Jeremy: In my art I often try to show a part of a story that makes people want to know the whole thing. Like a single frame from a movie, taken at a peculiar moment. I don't want to spell everything out. Sometimes people tell me what they think my paintings are about, and they're wildly fantastic. Way different than what I had in mind while making them. I like that. That's my best work in anyway. Some pieces are more of a quick read. Especially many of the commissioned illustrations.

Blair: What do you believe defines your style?

Jeremy: I try to play with opposites a lot, I want to keep things balanced. If I feel like the subject to too macabre I might paint it pink to even it out. I don't know what defines my style honestly. I don't feel like I have one, but other people can always tell what's mine. I see a lot of blogs where people talk about my work, and the optimal word seems to be "creepy." The problem is that don't think my art is creepy, and I don't want it to be. Sadly, I think that's where true creepiness comes from. It's not something you can do at will because it will look contrived. The fact that it's unintentional only makes it more unsettling. I often feel as though my hand is possessed, and it corrupts my drawing ideas into the dark images that fill my portfolio.

Blair: Any challenges faced when creating?

Jeremy: I have many challenges to face when I'm art making. For one, I'm almost always too tired because of a sleeping disorder. I try to power through it. I have to spend a lot of time sleeping, so I don't have very much free time to draw. I'm not a full time artist, I have a full time job, and it makes it very hard to do as much art as I'd like. Also, it seems to be impossible for me to make something that isn't creepy. Every painting starts in my mind as a lovely thought, and is corrupted by the possessed hand. This is debilitating to my illustration career, which requires me to be somewhat versatile. The real money in illustration is in advertising, and there's not too many campaigns who's objective is to give thousands of people the creeps. I could try to adapt to a more commercially digestible style, but I wouldn't be happy. Instead I'm moving towards doing more gallery shows.

Blair: What is the concept behind "Snowman?"

Jeremy: Sometimes I suddenly have an odd idea, and it strikes a chord in me so deep, that I cannot ignore it no matter how random it seems. "Snowman" is one of those pieces. I always try to draw these ideas because often it makes sense to me later. I realized after I made this drawing that this is a very personal piece, and the snowman is actually me. At the time I was completely shut-down emotionally due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following a gun robbery. An ice-man. I was also struggling with making the transition from college to full adulthood. I felt like this, a child trapped in an snowman's body.


Blair: What is the concept behind "Fridge?"

Jeremy: Some pieces I still can't explain, but there's something about the imagery that resonates for me. "Fridge" is one of those. I get stuck creatively, like anyone else, and I have many tactics to overcome it. Writing is one of them. I write about the subject I'm trying to illustrate, or just free-flowing sentences; whatever comes out. "Fridge" came from a short story, or poem I guess, that was about having a see-though girlfriend that lived in my fridge. I thought it was brilliant at the time, but I'm not confident in my writing, so I don't share it with people. It was probably total crap, and the product of a bout of mental illness, but I still like the drawing I did to accompany it.

Blair: What are your hopes for the future?

Jeremy: I hope in future that I'll be making a living as a well-repected artist. I think that's it really. I'm single-minded about my future. That has been my goal my whole life.

WonkaVision #42 illustrations

I got another email last week from Wonkavision saying they needed a bunch of illustrations and I asked for one called "The Punk bible." They have kind of a mass email/grab bag system for illustrations. They wrote back and asked if I could do the Josie Outlaw makeup one too, and said that they had to be done in like 4 days. Pretty tight. I didn't get the stories for another 2 days, so I had a day to do them both. It was hard, but not impossible. I find that what tends to suffer most in a tight deadline is the idea. I take about 2 weeks to work out ideas and compositions, then it usually only takes a day or two to do the painting.

The Punk bible ended up actually being "The Rock Bible", which I was surprised to learn was co-written by Patton Oswald. Either way, it was well suited for me. When I read the article all I could think was "Motorhead." When I think "Rock" that's what comes to mind, so I built the piece around it. I finally made the investment and got 2 Kolinsky sable brushes. One is an Isabey #5, which I used for both of these, and the other is a Raphael #6. The brush is incredible. It's worth it if you use a brush to ink. If you use pens, I think you should just use a nice brush, you can get more precise details than a micron 005, and you can use super black waterproof India ink.

The other illustration is about Josie Outlaw of the AKA's. She started a make-up line called Red Letter Girl. Unfortunately, that was about the extent of the article. This was a really hard assignment for me, but I like that. The Rock Bible piece was obviously my element, but having to draw something in a positive light was more problematic than I thought it would be. I've been thinking about this one a lot. This assignment involved drawing lots of things that I'm not strong at: It had to be positive, she had to be alive, a likeness, I'm not good at drawing women, and it had to have a lot of bright colors, which is really hard to do. I feel like the drawing was strong, but when it got to coloring it, the variety of colors made it all seem disunited. I like to work with a limited palette. I almost never paint flesh tones. I don't care for them, and I find it hard to work that tan into the color scheme of a painting. Plus a believe that it's much more interesting the the skin is a different color; it helps to build a more fantastical world. I need to work of these problems something fierce because I'll never be able to make a living just doing record covers. I also did vignettes for some reason, I never do vignettes and that's a compositional challenge of it's own. It's hard to deal with all that white too. I enjoyed the challenge, and I think it will help me develop a style for this kind of work.

Lyon

Wow, 2 posts in one day. I just finished this personal painting. I've been doing less band artwork lately to focus on personal projects. This painting started out as an exercise and turned into a really nice piece in my opinion. That almost always happens, where the paintings I'm just doing for fun are the strongest, but this time I painted it on a loose surface instead of in my goddamn sketchbook where I can't even show it. The surface is something I made for the Blues "Snakepit" album that I didn't use. This painting looks much better in real life. Like I said, I wasn't expecting it to be anything but a fun painting, so it's not primed correctly or anything to facilitate better scanning. The result is that it scanned HORRIBLY and I spend a bunch of time trying to make it passable. Healing tool = Awesome. Raw canvas reacts strangely in the scanner, plus the triple thick crystal clear varnish I finished it with was reflecting badly off the edges of the cut canvas. I have a problem where I do my best work on terrible surfaces, I'm sure that it's because it's less intimidating, and I feel less anxious about messing it up. My most popular painting is on a flooring sample and man, I wish it wasn't.

This was much painterly as far as process then most of my work. No sketches, no preconceived composition. Just exploration of the form, color, and medium. I painted this back and forth several times, and although it was tedious, it looks richer and I learned a lot. My plans for the future are to do more gallery work. I feel like I'm better suited for it, so expect to see more personal paintings like this.

Italian toy show

A couple months ago I got an email from LAB81, an Italian design company trying to break into the ever-so-popular PVC toy market. They asked 40 artists and designers to do these toys for a show that will be traveling around Italy. It sounded fun, and new, so I said yes. Everything went smoothly until I got to actually painting the figures (meaning that drawing out my ideas of paper went well). They're made of clear PVC(vinyl) and are slightly flexible. I wanted to write a blog chronicling the process, but I ended up running into so many problems that I forgot what I did. Mostly, the acrylic paint wouldn't stick at first, I just thought it was the material, but now I'm wondering if there was a lubricant on them to ease release from the mold. So I spray painted them with primer, and it just remained endlessly sticky. The acrylic I put over it too, it just wouldn't dry. So every time I touched them with paint on my hard it stuck, and if they touched anything else, it stuck. the paint also rubbed off at the slightest touch. I painted one, then the paint started cracking so I had to start over and strip off the acrylic with rubbing alcohol, then the spray paint with turpenoid. I painted these things so many times; really frustrating. Also, my roommate's cat decided to gnaw on one of them. I tried to repair it, but you can still kinda tell. This was a difficult challenge and I learned a lot, but think I'll stick to 2-D for a while. One thing I leaned is that there's a huge community of toy artists and toy collectors out there, I didn't realize the scope of it. People are dead serious about it too, they even commission artists to paint toys for them.

The theme of the show is love and hate. I decided to make the hate figure have a little love and vice versa because I don't believe in those kinds of absolutes.

P.S. Sorry for the crap photos!

Finally got the Ed Gein record

I don't remember when I did the art for this record, it was a while ago that's for sure. It seemed like everyone had seen the actual pressing except for me. Today I got a care package from Hex. It's a truly fine release that I'm proud to have my name on. The record itself is a hefty (180 gram?) one molded from translucent cream and red vinyl. I didn't have any part in that, and I didn't know it was going to be on colored vinyl, but I like it a lot. Also seen, some other goodies thrown in. This is sort-of a standard package from an indie record company when you do art for them. It's nice.

Then there's a really sweet wheat-paste I saw in China-town that just happened to be on my camera as I was importing photos.

Rambowski

Another shirt design for Graf Orlock. This one was a bit of trouble. I worked closely with Alan from Graf on ideas, mostly because their shirts tend to be concept based, and I'm realizing that I don't have a lot of strength in that realm. I'm good at making things look cool, of conveying emotion, or being creepy, but there's never really a punchline. I can't describe my art work, it doesn't sound cool, you just have to see it.
I was originally going to draw Conan slashing up terminator machines. I drew Conan and 1 1/2 machines before quiting. It was coming out horrible, and the machines were taking me forever to draw. I knew it would be a challenge, but it was too much for me. Conan also didn't look like Arnold, and his face was drawn for too small to really get a likeness. I was going to post it here, but I decided that it's just WAY too bad for anyone else to ever see. So, sometimes you have to realize that it's not working, and cut your losses. I had one night to do this shirt left. I went home from work, got dinner and an energy drink (which I've been drinking a lot of lately) and went home to sink my teeth into this. Let me tell you about this energy drink called Venom. If you HAVE to get things done, drink one of those things. Holy crap. And I don't want any of you guys shaking your heads about my energy drink consumption. I have a legitimate sleeping disorder, which I used to take ADDERALL for, so this is much better in my opinion. Got to get that surgery, damn.

I'm really glad I started over, this came out pretty killer, and it didn't even take that long. One thing I know about myself is that I work well under pressure.

Disintegration Self-Portrait

I'm going to be working on a 7" cover for Born Anchors and they want me to paint the band in the same style as my "Lipstick" painting. Naturally, I need to pull their likeness' out of it, which is an interesting challenge. I did this test yesterday since I'm waiting for some reference shots from them.