Q. After completing your degree in Film, Video and Integrated Media at Emily Carr University you went on to study illustration and design at Designskolen Kolding, in Denmark. What prompted the switch to illustration, and why choose to study in Denmark?

A. During my final year at Emily Carr, I worked on an animated film with a hand-drawn, illustrative look for my grad project. Some people asked if I have ever considered doing Illustration after watching my film. I didn’t have a concrete idea what I wanted to do but I was opened to trying new things.

At the same time I really needed a break from Vancouver to travel around and live somewhere else. Designskolen Kolding happened to be one of the few schools in Europe offered illustration and design courses in English, so I stayed and studied there for about 7 months after traveling around for a month.

Q. We love the prints “Untitled Collage” that you did with the Swedish creative team Rasterosett. Can you tell us how this collaboration came about, and how you approach working with other creatives?

A. I met Sandra, the co-founder of Rasterrosett, during my first year of Emily Carr while she was on exchange. We’ve worked on a few crazy and fun projects together for school and we’d always talked about collaborating on something on our own. During her latest visit in Vancouver we finally had a chance to do so.

Since we’re both inspired by the cityscape and the environment we decided to base our collaboration on that. She collected sources for the collage while I drew some things that came to mind in relation to the environment that surrounded us. It’s always a rewarding experience working with other creatives, combining two very different styles and work processes to create something new and unexpected.

Q. Given unlimited time and resources, what would be your “dream project”?

A. I’d love to collaborate with artists I like to create something for the public space in Vancouver, because I feel that’s what we’re lacking in the city.

Q. What are you working on right now? Anything coming up we can look forward to?

A. These days I’m trying to pick up painting again. Besides a few commissions I’m also working on some artwork for a potential solo show in the near future. I’ll keep you posted!

S&TM: We would like to thank Andrea Wan for making amazing work and taking the time to do this interview.

Q: The dinosaurs are a fun counterpoint to the religious iconography in your paintings. How did they find their way into your images?

A: I love dinosaurs. I don’t know. They’re just there and people really seem to like them, which makes me happy. People say they’re feministic, but I’m just having some fun and painting hot girls on these sort of phallic reptilian beasts.

I find they’re more about my love of style than anything else. This series is separate, it’s called The New Archeology. The others, concerning the East and idols, are called The New Ethnography.

Photo by Eugen Sakhnenko

Your body of work is really inspiring, even more so considering you’re still in school. How has your university experience influenced your growth as an artist, and do you have any specific direction planned for after you graduate?

Not to sound like I’m plugging the school or anything, because I know a lot of people haven’t had the best experiences with it, but my time at OCAD has really changed my outlook on art making and has many ways rejuvenated my passion in it.

The professors particularly in the illustration department really pushed me to try my hardest. After a few embarrassing critiques in second year, I kinda started to clue into what made an exciting picture. I started to constantly compare my work to art I loved being published in books, and fawned over in art galleries, and just try to meet (and ideally surpass, but yeah right) that quality.

A fellow student pretty much taught me how to paint because I had never done it before. So I shifted my work out of the computer and started to get more excited about the results.

As for the direction I hope to head in after I graduate, I just aim to to spread out a bit and experiment more with other mediums and visual motifs. I don’t know why but I always feel a little embarrassed when people ask my medium and I say acrylics. I rarely find work I’m excited about when it’s done with them so I spend a lot of time making sure they don’t look too acrylic-y.

We’ve noted a recurring “beard” motif in your illustrations. Could you tell us about some of the themes you explore in your work?

I always get teased about the beards/hairs/pubes in my paintings by my friends. I tend to focus on that sort of imagery because it really set people and the concept outside of time and I felt it helped create a timeless looking picture. I felt a little bummed when I saw it become sort of a trend in a lot of peoples work so I’ve made a conscious effort to try and stop doing it but clearly I haven’t really.

I have a huge obsession with the past, particularly the rise of America and all the awful things that have happened over here. The steady destruction of the wildlife, and feeling like everything you do in your day to day life destroys what supports us, makes me feel increasingly sad and conflicted about what I should be doing. At times I feel like making art is indulgent and I should be involved in causes that have more impact. So I’m trying to shift my work in a way where I convey issues I’m passionate about.

Much of your work, such as the cover for Blood Meridian, involves some hand rendered typography. Are you working towards a specific design aesthetic, or do approach each illustration individually?

I’ve been taking stabs at hand rendered typography because I love the way it can look. And it’s really fun and satisfying to do. I also love the way pictures look in design contexts. Doing the Blood Meridian cover in my own time was a nice little exercise to see how one of my images would look in the place of a book cover. Going to a record or book store is so fun to just look at the packaging. I get so pumped when I see a beautiful design and how multiple images can come together to create a beautiful cohesive thing. I see it much how an album is compiled – songs fit together in certain ways and in a lot of cases totally enhance the feeling and power of a song through its sequencing.

Looking at a record cover, and the back, and then flipping it open can be a similarly breathtaking experience in how each image can add to another ones power.

I definitely aim to develop a pretty specific design aesthetic so hopefully someone will always recognize my work as only my own.I use recurring design elements and textures that I hope make my images cohesive but at the same time I want every painting to carry its own weight and stand strongly on its own.

We love the concept for the 360º collaborative mural for the group show at xpace you’re participating in. Can you tell us about the idea behind this project and what it’s like collaborating with the artists involved?

This was really fun and stressful to do, and all the credit must go to the very hard work of Jessie Durham and Dmitry Bondarenko who basically got everyone all together and organized the whole thing.

The shows theme was basically set around the idea of a procession and it’s called Cavalcade. Everyone got their own section of the wall and we spent a lot of time figuring out who would be beside who, and how everything would fit together. I was really happy that I got to collaborate with my good friend Adrian Forrow, and be a part of a show with so many talented folk! We all planned to have our set spots and leave space between each person’s mural for a fully collaborative section that eases the viewer into the next person’s work.

I pretty much planned from the get go that Adrian would be introducing his characters into my own mural heavily. But now everyone is in a place where we can really improvise and find neat and exciting ways to add our own visual vocabulary to each others pieces. We really have no idea how it’s going to transform!

After the show ends it’s going to be tough to paint over all our hard work, but it’s also refreshing to be making something based solely on the excitement of creation and collaboration and not have to worry about sales. If the show sounds exciting to you come check it out early and then on the closing so you really get a sense of how it has transformed. Every Friday of the shows running time there will be at least one of the artists will be in working on it so feel free to drop by, we’d love to talk to anyone interested!

Any upcoming projects we can look forward to?

Right now I’m head deep in all things thesis, and I’m really excited about where it’s heading! It’s a series of paintings based around the turning points of various outlaws, drug lords, rebels etc… and the reasons why they reject society’s rules, and carve their own unlawful paths through life, and achieved their infamy. I’ve included one of my images about Black Bart, the gentlemanly robber of Wess Fargo’s stagecoaches. This company wanted to buy his mining land and he refused so they cut off his water supply and out of revenge he began robbing only them. He was known for how polite he was and even left a few poems at two of his crime scenes.

There are so many other interesting figures and it’s really exciting researching all of these fascinating people. So come May I’ll have a whole new body of work each focusing on a different figure and hopefully it goes well!

How would you describe your work?

In terms of concept, I would have to say my drawings are something like visual short stories, at least the best ones are. Most often I want the viewer to feel they’ve interrupted some secret goings-on, and I give them just a glimpse of the story to decipher. I aim to nurse the ambiguities and free associations in my pictures without allowing them to become meaningless. In my simpler pieces based on more straight-forward visual metaphors, I do my best to add a touch of the unexpected or the subjective, to keep them from being one-liners.

In terms of technique: compulsive detail, obsessive composition, bright colours forced into dark schemes.

What made you decided to move to Vienna? With most business being conducted online these days, do you feel your choice of geographical location has an impact on your work?

I moved to Vienna to be with my girlfriend Lisa, who is Austrian. It was easier for me to relocate to the EU than for her to Canada, and I always wanted to live abroad anyway so it made sense for us.

I wouldn’t say that the internet makes an artist’s choice of location irrelevant by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think it gives us a lot more options. Publishing being what it is here, I think I’d be hard pressed to make a living in illustration in Vienna (unless I were a political cartoonist, they have a thriving bunch of political cartoonists here) if it weren’t for the internet, so in that sense it opens things up, but I believe that being in close proximity to your fellows and your clients remains a major advantage.

Your bio tells us of how your early experiences as illustrator happened working on high-school gig posters. What have been your major influences since then?

Well since those day I’ve lived a lot of experiences and seen a lot of art, and they’ve all shaped the art I’m making now. If we’re speaking strictly in terms of artists, the most directly influencial since that time have been old-timers including Rackham, Schiele, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, and Klimt. Contemporary artists such as Tomer Hanuka, Yuko Shimizu, Ghostshrimp, Sam Weber and Carson Ellis have lit some pretty serious fires under me, and I’ve recently become enamored with ornamental design and patterning, and the work of Viennese architect Otto Wagner.

Beyond all that the things I draw are very much marked by travel, reading about history and biology, and long hours of kitchen work.

You attended Yuko Shimizu’s Summer Illustration Workshop in Venice. Can you tell us a bit about that experience and how it has influenced your work?

That’s one more way moving to Vienna has been an advantage, as I likely wouldn’t have made it over to Venice from Nova Scotia. Taking Yuko’s course was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Yuko is a master, and happens to understand very well where I’m coming from artistically.

Marshall Arisman said something about when you’re learning from a teacher they’re not so much teaching you something new as reminding you of what you already know. I don’t know if I’d subscribe to that as an absolute, but I think in many cases it’s true. Yuko brought out into the light the weaknesses in my work that were nagging at the back of my mind, but that I had never seen clearly enough to resolve. That, combined with the encouragement to pursue the kind of drawing I most love to do, (and hence the kind of drawing I’m best at) resulted in some huge leaps forward in my portfolio.

Your ongoing collaboration with writer Michael Kimber has yielded some wonderful work. Do you approach this type of project differently than usual client work?

Yes, definitely. Michael provides no art direction whatsoever, and we work simply on the understanding that I’m responding to his writing in an honest and spirited way. There are no real deadlines, and I do these drawings when I can get to them and when something in his writing sparks a reaction. I was very happy with the first two, ‘Champions Of Breakfast’ and ‘Empty Nest’, they were strong visual comments with a sense of humor. But the third piece ‘Treading Water’ is in my opinion one of my strongest works, and it was the result of a much more personal response to heavier source material.

‘Both Our Houses’ is a fascinating piece. Was this a personal project? Can you tell us about the image and what it means to you?

Yes, that was a personal piece. It’s about the effects of colonisation on the native nations of what is now Canada. This is a topic I first worked with at the end of art school, for my graduate exhibition ‘White Eyes’. There is so much to say about this part of Canadian history, and it’s such a huge part of that history, but for the most part we don’t talk about it much. It’s impossible to ‘tell it like it was’ because we’re too intimately involved with it and the historical sources are too one-sided, so I focus on my own responses to what I manage to learn and to what I see around me, and that response is dominated by horror and sadness.

Growing up as a Canadian kid, I learned throughout my schooling about ‘Les Amérindiens’ (I went to school in French), and I grew to love them. As I grew older and my interest remained, I continued to learn about them on my own and eventually I had to face up to the realities behind what I had learned in school.

In this piece the central image is the blanket of locusts and roaches, and this stands for the smallpox that wiped out huge swaths of the native populations, and the famous ‘Hudson’s Bay Blankets’ that helped spread the disease. In addition to that, I’ve made reference to the myths of the ‘Red Man’ in film and television that still dominate popular perception of native peoples, and the often-broken promises of the many Treaties throughout our history. There are other elements here of my personal reflections on the matter, but the above are the ones that best lend themselves to this sort of explanation.

What would you most like to see yourself doing in the coming years? Do you have any upcoming projects we can look forward to?

For now I’m just focusing on steady work as an illustrator. I’ve been treading part-time, semi-pro water for such a long time that all I’m really after at the moment is to keep this boat afloat full-time. Learning self-promotion and trying to do it effectively is a whole new art, and it’s keeping me pretty busy.

Further down the road I can imagine teaching or Art Direction, and if I allow myself to daydream (and of course I do) I like to see myself having my pick of clients and trying my hand at toy design, typography, animation and pattern design ( I would love to design excessively intricate wallpaper if only people still wanted it ).

I’m preparing to release a small edition of prints in the very near future. Right now I’m collecting suggestions through my facebook page as to which piece I should run, and an edition of 20 signed giclée prints will be available in the coming weeks.

It’s easy to forget that you’re visiting a downtown art gallery while surrounded by taxidermied baby albino unicorn goats, aged oil portraits of masked dignitaries, occult emblems, exquisite mineral formations, scenes of pagan rites, jewelery, Jesus snatching squirrels, bones, and knitted cacti.

Described as “a study and celebration of collection fetishism”, The Dazzle raises questions about the impulse to seek out the strange and unknown, to catalog and collect artifacts from the fringes of the known world.

All works shown here are copyright of the originating artists.

The always beautiful, funny and incisive work of artist/illustrator Anita Kunz has long been a favorite of ours here at S&TM. Her new exhibition, with fellow artist Maurice Vellekoop, titled The Naughty Show treats us to no less than 100 nude portraits of famous men.

Portraiture and parody have always figured prominently in her illustrations (gracing the covers of Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker). In The Naughty Show these are combined with her beautifully expressive attention to the naked form, often explored in her fine art work.

The Naughty Show consists of 100 nudes of famous men. Could you tell us about what inspired the theme, and some of the ideas you were exploring in making these portraits?

So I thought I’d do a series of male nudes, and while I was at it I thought I might as well make them portraits of famous men! John Currin painted a nude of Bea Arthur so I thought why not?

We loved the wildly different forms and figures of the various celebrities in the show. Were their bodies drawn straight from your imagination, or did you have some secret reference material? What was your process like when creating these images?

Was it a deliberate choice to have the show premiere coincide with pride week here in Toronto?

Yes the show was intended to be a celebration of Pride. And I was so thrilled to show with Maurice Vellekoop. He’s an amazing artist and dear friend.

Mainstream media still has a lot of hang-ups when it comes to showing male nudity. Was showing famous men in the nude a way to address this?

I was actually a bit nervous about the possible fall out (i.e. would Donald Trump sue me? ) But ultimately it’s parody, so its intent was to be a subtle way to poke fun at convention.

Do you approach your fine art work differently from commercial illustration projects? Do you have a preference for one or the other?

Images © 2010 Anita Kunz

portfolio | twitter | prints

S&TM: We’ve been trying to decode some of the recurring motifs in your paintings: severed snake tails, speech bubbles in the forms of constellations, nodes or molecules. Without giving too much away, would you discuss what some of these mean to you?

Nick Sheehy: I don’t think I’m interested in singular or explicit meanings. I like uncertainty, and shades of grey. I also think that the meaning interpreted by the viewer is just as interesting as the one intended by the creator. I tend to just draw without thinking too much and I try to draw scenes I have never seen before.

Most of the visual elements you see come from my personal experiences. I draw a lot of birds and snakes, because that’s what was around me as I grew up in Australia. I like drawing guitars because I play guitar and my dad kept giving them to me as birthday presents.

The costumes are probably inspired by my girlfriend’s quilting. I draw wooden structures when I am making things out of wood (for the garden for instance) and I draw lots of plants when new growth is all around in Spring.

When you group these objects together over the space of a few works, you can start to build up colonies and worlds of varying weirdness where new narratives and mythologies start to evolve and everyday objects start to take on magical qualities.

Images © 2010 Nick Sheehy

These are the beautiful paintings of Brazilian artist Talita Hoffmann. Inspired by the world around her, she says “my ideas come from the things I see and keep with me”. Her epic stories of mythical civilizations, reminiscent Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of the afterlife, seem of a time yet to be or from some distant past. Here animals and humans coexist, sharing and building a world for both to inhabit and flourish.

Talita Hoffmann’s website

Images © 2010 Talita Hoffmann