Interview

What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?

“I have always considered myself a creative type of person since I was at a young age. I remember being fascinated by drawing cartoons when I was in grade school and that was the majority of my experience up until I became a preteen. That is when I noticed I preferred to create with still life whether it was a painting or a gesture drawing. I realized quickly that I had little to no skill set on drawing living things such as faces and animals and that greatly limited me for a while. At that time I painted a lot of nature scenes and then moved to drawing scenes with charcoal. I loved the feedback with charcoal but I hated the mess and how each line practically meant a piece's success or failure in my eyes. Like most artists, I am a perfectionist with my art and I love to loathe my creations when my mood has shifted. It didn't take long into my teens and then college that I liked one point perspective. A good portion of my drawings will be some form of point perspective with a strict adherence to straight but slightly off angles making the piece off putting while interesting at the same time. I originally wanted to study architecture and did drafting for both mechanics and architecture for five years before eventually leaving college due to my mental health. It was at that time I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was seeing a lot of things I didn't really understand and started to shift mediums to fiction and photography for a while, when I was trying to understand what was going on in my head.”

What does your work aim to say? Does it comment on any current social or political issues?

“In 2011, when I got my diagnosis, I started Life of a Dying Poet, my website. Here is my official start to getting my thoughts into others minds. I was really concerned with my mental health and I wanted to bring mental health as the point of interest to start a conversation, but I had no interest in providing the answers. So that became the point. To state there is a conversation needing to be had on mental health, show others how it affects me through art and other forms of content, then create a conversation around it but leave it there. I ended up getting my degree in social work over ten years later but even though I understood mental health much better, and even wanted to pursue psychiatry, I didn't feel qualified enough to offer advice to such a wide audience other than through art. Largely my art deals with my mental health at the time so it can be a political thing, it does deal a lot with the idea of religion or the concept of a creator. I don't find myself ‘religious’ in a way, more spiritual, but I do find myself fascinated with the idea of how social groups form around ideas and religion is no stranger to that dynamic in everyday life. I like to use each piece to state how I am feeling at the time through images and colors whether it be abstract or something concrete and in your face. I have another condition called alexithymia which makes identifying the present emotion very difficult for me so art, especially my digital collages, has been considerable on how I process my emotions. I tend to get fixated on words, phrases, and images so I include them to get the thought out so I can move on to my a new hyper fixation.”

Do you plan your work in advance, or is it improvisation?

“I feel there is an occasion for everything. Because of how I conceptualize my digital collages, or what I call digital collé, it is largely improvised until I feel the emotion or feeling has been relieved or subsided. When I physically draw or paint however, it's a different story, everything is meticulously planned out because I am very particular with my compositions, these pieces are largely images I have in my head that I want to put on paper. A lot of my physical drawings have been hallucinations from my schizophrenia and I tend to rationalize it by planning out a piece but I've been very stable for quite some time now so I've mostly moved away from that approach.”

Are there any art world trends are you following?

“I beat to my own drum. I may be on TikTok and other social medias but I really don't like to scroll. I tend to seek out information or concepts but I like to stay away from trends. I'm sure if I looked, it would create a lot of ideas for me so that could be a crux for me when it comes to making art but I have enough ideas already. So I would much prefer them being unique ideas that I created, or got inspired by. I will say with AI coming into everyday life, I have utilized it as a tool. I was at a friend's wedding this last September and he had a buddy who was intrigued with AI, specifically in the artists world, and he asked me how I could use that as a response because it is creating art and it could create uncertainty to some people. I responded to him stating that my medium focus at this time is manipulation. I like to take images, and I like to put them in a space and manipulate the image until it is something that says what I want to say. I know AI learns from us and I am learning from AI. I have a few videos and images I created on my TikTok this last month that had an image or two that was created by AI because I couldn't find an image that I could have access to that said exactly what I needed to say. So I used AI to generate one, I cut out all the extras and used it in the final work. It's funny when you think about it. From what I understand AI learns from the internet and takes what it learns to fulfil your request. It manipulates what it learns. I then take the image and manipulate it to serve its purpose. I would imagine at one point in the future, AI will soon look at that image and create a new image. A form of Christopher Nolan's Inception but in a few pieces I have done.”

What process, materials and techniques do you use to create your artwork?

“Today's hyper fixation is digital collages focused on anti design. I want to create something that is weird and chaotic with an abundance of maximalism. I largely focus on surrealism but at no fault of my own. It's just how I feel an image needs to be designed and what I view as aesthetically pleasing to me. I first begin with a concept and this could be an image or a word or even a song that I'm listening to. I then open my digital design space to look at it and I just think about it when looking through my assets which I acquired through either making, buying the rights for, or vintage assets I have collected through the years from old magazines and films. From there, I usually let my ideas flow onto the canvas and it's improved until I feel satisfied with how it looks. I mess with a lot of blending tools, just to make things jarring enough to catch the eye but not be full off-putting. Once the piece is done, I make my way up to my creative space in my home and I print it out on a twelve by twelve canvas to hang on a wall in the hallway of my home. It sits here for a few days where I just let it stew. If I don't criticize it enough to want to change it, that usually becomes the final image, otherwise I change it and rinse and repeat until I am fully happy with what I made.”

What does your art mean to you?

“Most people will save their memories through photos. I won’t say I don't too but as I look through each image because they are a snapshot of a emotion or life event I can usually place the time in my life in which I made it and almost have a story to what I was feeling as I chose each image. One day, I could get enough of these in a scrapbook like portfolio as if it was a photo album and it would be a very interesting way to explain my life's moments through a nontraditional method.”

What’s your favourite artwork and why?

“A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet. I can go on about why I love this but I'll keep this simple for now. The perspective is off with the mirror behind the barmaid. It's different. It beats to its own drum. It creates its own story. I would like to feel I am the same and I live my life that way.”

Website: lifeofadyingpoet.com

Instagram: @lifeofadyingpoet

Other links: www.tiktok.com/@lifeofadyingpoet