What made you jump into the whole touring aspect? You’ve toured quite a bit with bands, and usually on a whim.

Portugal the Man was really one of the only bands that I looked at and said “I want to shoot them”. I manifested the idea of following a band on tour, only because I got a gig with Portugal The Man shooting them for a magazine. Sheepishly I approached their manager about shooting them, and surprisingly from there I got flown out to Chicago to shoot them again. At that moment I knew I didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t. I stayed on for the rest of the tour. It was an on the fly decision.

You’re on you’re own for the most part, but do you consider yourself to be in the industry?

I do consider myself to be in the industry. A part of it at least. The photography industry is very difficult. I think every year it starts to get more intense. There isn’t a correct way to pursue this, but I’ve had to do it my way. I don’t have a degree in business or a big diploma saying that I’m some fancy photographer. Photography is like any art. There are many paths to take, but there is no formula, or “right” way to do it. I’ve realized that a lot of the industry is based on decisions. Making hard decisions is a part of the job. Most people aren’t used to having that much responsibility, especially about the stability of their job.

In your line of work, what has been the most fulfilling experience?

The most fulfilling experience I’ve had is a hard one. I’ve done so much with photography, and seen so many people and things. I was assisting a shoot for a friend, and it was shooting cats and dogs, [but] the handlers also have a lot of exotic animals. They happened to have two white Bengal tiger siblings—I was petting an endangered baby animal! Who in their life will get to experience that? Things that I would have never guessed.

You also had an amazing chance to work with the first ever Parkour Federation. How did this come onto your horizon?

Working with them has been so fate related. It was off of craigslist. I was browsing through, and found their posting looking for interns on an action sports show. They weren’t even looking for a photographer. I was the first person to contact them, and I got to talking to the co-owner of the World Federation of Parkour. I mentioned that I did photography and got the job from there. It’s been an amazing time too. The Federation is made up of some of the best Parkour athletes in the world. While I shot them, I get to ask if they can do crazy stunts, “Can you jump from this gap to this roof ledge, and do a flip here?” and they’ll do it. I feel sort of selfish knowing that I am endangering their lives for a photo (laughs).

What is your work like in a general week?

I’m constantly ping-ponging between LA and SF. I got to shoot the pride parade for the LA times, and then I drove back into LA that night. Got up the very next morning and shot a band for AP. I’m really throwing myself into this and going where the work is. At the same time I’m also having a blast doing the most random and interesting jobs.

You love this work, but more importantly, what makes this job worth it to you?

What is worth it, is that I’m keeping my word. I’m being honest with what I do, in a world saturated with photographers who are just looking for a paycheck. I’m being reliable. Secondly, I’m getting the exposure I want. I live very in the moment, and the real accomplishment with photography is growing and learning more. Building a long history of my work that I can look back on. This is more about getting my art out there for people to share in, and letting people see the work I truly love.

Interview by Nikolaus Bartunek
Photos courtesy Emily Ibarra

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Be sure to visit ediphotoeye.com to contact Emily and see more of her work

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Where are you from and where do you live now?

Los Angeles. I’m back in Venice. I was in Oakland for the last two years, in a ridiculously awesome studio called The Paper Mill. It used to be a paper mill – and it’s about 5,000 square feet. I was living there with a few other artists that are good friends of mine and really awesome: Seth Armstrong and Chris Russell and Michael Louis Young.

Unfortunately I had to leave, because my real life exists in LA. It was kind of a vacation up there. But I got a lot of work done.

What are the differences and similarities between LA and the Bay Area?

Differences are just enormous, starting with traffic and public transportation and size and infrastructure… and just the general feel of the people, at least that I was interacting with. Not just my friends, or artists and stuff, but everybody. I love San Francisco and Oakland… and I miss it. But it’s nice to have both, they’re close and I can always go back and forth. They’re both home to me.

At least in art, I feel a much bigger community in San Francisco and Oakland, and feel much more connected to it. But in LA… I feel a stronger connection to the business side of my life and art and film. LA is the place I grew up, I love it more than anything. It could be ugly… it’s never gonna change in my mind. All my friends and family are still down here too.

I’m sure there’s tons going on in LA.

Oh, there is. There’s definitely a lot, and especially like all the cities coming up with a bunch of galleries, Downtown, Culver City and Venice. There’s a lot of art here. I feel disconnected from it, a little bit. I think it’s because I do other things; I work in production, I work in film stuff, and I have a script that’s coming into a movie now, so I’m working with a lot more film people than I am with art people here. Whereas up there, I only kind of worked with art people.

Name the best street food in Venice.

I think every single one of those trucks comes through and… my studio is right off Venice and Abbot Kinney. All those trucks park out front of the Brig… I like the Kogi truck, the Korean barbeque is good. I had this one taco truck, these pork tacos with mango and peppers. That’s pretty awesome. I’ve tried all of them. I don’t like the hot dogs very much, but I think the rest of them are pretty good. There’s a barbeque one too, coming around lately, like a regular Southern barbeque, that’s good.

So… a lot then.

It’s pretty much all I eat, because it’s closer than Abbot’s pizza. So every day, if I’m in the studio, and don’t want to walk very far, I go there.

Favorite beer?

Everyone knows I’m a Budweiser man. But I switch over a lot. I kind of have this routine, my birthday is July 3rd, and I drink beer all summer and Fall, and then at Christmas I switch over to Jameson’s until my birthday again. Right now I’m not drinking too much.

What is your creative process when you’re painting?

In my mind, the look of it, like the feel of my work, it’s my feelings for California. Basically the images are coming from the feelings I have from the  sun, rock and roll music, and I don’t know if that sounds weird or if that makes sense… in my mind it makes sense, because the same feeling I get from the images I’m creating is the same feeling I get from those. A lot of people think it has a 60s or 70s feel to it. But I think it’s… it’s warm, it’s easy, the aesthetics are easy to appreciate.

The process for me is… daydreaming. I have a lot of books for sketching, drawing, and also just thoughts. The project I’m working on is sort of about California, it has an implied narrative to it. Sort of a loose storyline that goes through it. It’s 50 paintings, in five sets, with ten in each set, which are just different content – the style is the same all the way through. And there are 100 smaller illustration pieces that I’m gonna do in the book also. The book is called “I Can Only Give You Everything” and is going to be out this fall.

In (the series of) paintings there’s one in the forest, there’s one that’s a tragic shipwreck kind of series, there’s an oiling series, in the same feel of “There Will Be Blood” California history, there’s a cowboy one… and there’s an architecture one.

I’m about halfway through the paintings for the project. I’m finishing the cowboys and I’m about to start the oiling one, and that’s going to be just awesome.

It sounds like a lot of work.

Yeah, it’s a lot of work. For me, I like to do a lot of work all at once and then push it out into the world, instead of one at a time. I think some artists are staggered, slowly putting stuff out. For me it’s a lot easier to have a whole idea and be able to just hit it. The book I’m really excited about. A lot of people that like my work… a lot of people I want to connect with, are unable to afford some of the bigger pieces. This way, they can have the whole collection, you know, in their hands, look through it, appreciate it, have it on the bookshelf.

Ten of the paintings, I’m doing a thing where the people, the fans, I created a fan page for it, which is I guess gaining momentum right now. It’s really cool to be able to communicate with all of these people all at the same time. I think that’s a new thing for art too, for artists to have that open communication. So.. the 10 most popular paintings of the project… based on this feedback I’m getting from all these people, are going to be turned into prints. My friend Connor at Forthrite Printing in Oakland, he’s doing really nice 8-color silkscreens on archival paper, in a series of 100. So that’s going to come out when the book comes out too. I did a test run of that last year when I did this thing with Urban Outfitters, and they sold out immediately, so that was really fun because all these people get their own piece.

What materials do you usually work with?

Acrylic house paint on wood panels. Then I cover it with with a resin which is cool because it makes it look like a layer of glass on top. Makes it really pop, especially with my style it works really well.

Who or what are your influences and inspirations?

Growing up, I was skateboarding and into music, so my biggest influences for creative things were coming from those. That was the time that Ed Templeton, Aaron Rose and the Beautiful Losers stuff, all the artists there like Thomas Campbell, Mark Gonzales… all those guys were whose work I encountered most often. I really appreciated the way that it was connected to the same things I was connected to.

I guess it would be them. But then, I love Egon Schiele, of all those traditional artists you can go to out there. And I really, really love old traditional, really nicely rendered oil paintings. It couldn’t be farther from what I’m doing, but artists have always been painting naked chicks, and I get kind of a lot of comments about that from some people. But artists have always been doing it. Maybe it’s my style, flashier or poppier, and some people consider it a more contemporary kind of thing.

Aside from painting, do you have any other creative outlets?

In college I studied English, and I was originally going to go into film, I started working in film, and I was always doing my art thing. So, when I was finishing up college, I wanted to focus on something I loved to do, and I didn’t necesarily have enough time dedicated to every day. So that way, I was able to read and write every day. It’s hard to do the same thing all day, every day, so you have to have other ways… to work, and so with writing I can work still at the same speed, and in the same way, exploring my mind, getting these ideas out, without getting burned out on painting, and then I can go right back to painting, and that way I never am not working, but I don’t lose the energy. I don’t have a dry spell with the painting or the writing, I can keep switching back and forth.

So… I wrote a script last spring that it looks like we’re going to go into production on this summer, which is fun. It’s in the horror genre, but it’s not the typical horror movie. It’s more towards a regular drama, and there’s no supernatural stuff. It’s really cool — we’ve got a lot of people excited about it, and the people I’m working with to make it are excellent, at the top of their game. So I think that it might turn out really well.

Anything else?

My dog is awesome. And the score is now 49-43, it’s still early, but the Lakers are going to win. And you can write that.

Interview by Justin Allen
Art courtesy SA Richard

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SARichard.com
CLICK HERE to become a fan on Facebook

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I’m from Southern California originally, though I spent my childhood on small islands while my father studied fish. Monsters are my favorite things to draw. I work freelance as a cartoonist, illustrator and designer, and spend the time I’m not working making comics and puppets. I publish my comics through my small press, Indrind Press, and sell them at a few small San Francisco bookstores. Right now I’m developing a muppets-style puppet show called Frown Town and I’m also working with my brother on a comic about our childhood in Corsica. My comic and illustration work is done entirely digital with a tablet. The puppets however are made out of felt, fleece, and foam from couch cushions scrounged from the streets of the Mission.

Words & Artwork courtesy Andy Warner.

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Check out new artwork, comics, and projects at andysaurus.com

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Originally from Chicago, I relocated to San Francisco in the fall of 2005. I always drew as a kid. In my teens, the skateboarding days, I admired slick, glossy illustrations and comics that left not a hint of process. I also appreciated punk rock flyers and zines and posters made in the “cut and paste” style. I tried to emulate both ways working, even though the two styles might seem at odds. More recently, my subject has been people.

How:

The steps should be visible.

A slick looking finish does not interest me as much as it once did.

I often make art on odd, discarded, or junk surfaces. I like to re-use.

An imperfect / weathered / marred surface is a great thing.

Most likely, I will paint it up, scratch it away, and then paint over it again.

I like to fight with the surface.

Add some text.

I prefer muted and/or dark colors.

For more info, visit:

www.telltaleheartstudio.com

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3. Artist Profile: Roland Topor

Roland Topor once asked us to “imagine an ancient typewriter in which all the keys have disappeared, save for three tiny letters: f, i, n.”

The end in French, as in fin du monde (the end of the world).

Topor’s mind worked this way, looking for the unexpected possibility of living nightmare in the ordinary. His art was often fantastical, but never distant from serious questions inhabiting our everyday reality.

Topor’s work took him across many media. He was a prolific illustrator, designer, novelist, screenwriter, painter, and song writer. Well-known in Europe but hardly heard of in the U.S., Topor was active in the Panic movement, which included Alejandro Jodorowsky, in the 1960s and worked in film and television in the 70s and 80s. He died in 1997.

Topor’s style seems to prefigure much of today’s “pop surrealism” or “lowbrow art.” Like the earlier French surrealists, he displays human bodies and other forms within the visual conventions of realism, but in bizarre contortions and physically impossible situations. And similar to current lowbrow art, he was engaged with pop culture and was more interested in direct satire and allegory than his surrealist forebears.

The paranoid and hallucinogenic feeling of Topor’s art may have something to do with his early experience in life. A Polish Jew, Topor was hid by his family from the Nazis as a child. After coming to Paris, he wrote “The Tenant,” a novel of social alienation and loss of identity. The novel was later made into a film by Roman Polanski.

Topor’s visual art included posters, magazine covers, and illustrations, and he widely published his artwork in popular journals and in books, not confining his work to a gallery setting.

It is Topor’s work in animation, though, that brought him to my attention. The short animated film Les Escargot and the full-length animated feature Fantastic Planet are two of the most disturbing and visionary animated works I have ever seen. You can view Les Escargot here on YouTube in its entirety, though the low resolution isn’t so great.

Les Escargot, like Fantastic Planet after it, were collaborations of director Renee Laloux with Roland Topor, but it is Topor’s distinctive visual sensibility that dominates both. Les Escargot is apocalyptic, teeming with allegory of self-perpetuated human destruction. Like in other works by Topor, the ordinary is blown up to monstrous and absurd proportions. Fed by plants stimulated by human tears, enormous garden snails run amok, destroying the cities.

Fantastic Planet is a sci-fi epic like none you’ve ever seen. A 70’s euro-funk soundtrack backs the eerie psychedelic visuals of an alien world. On the fantastic planet, humans are kept as pets by the gigantic Oms, a blue-skinned humanoid species who live for thousands of years and have a highly evolved culture and technology. Nonetheless, they are discompassionate towards the humans. The humans revolt after one clever pet hacks some of the Om technology. Revolutionary metaphors abound, and like much science fiction literature, but unlike most science fiction movies, the film is really about our contemporary situation despite the fantastical setting.

Words by Justin Allen

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Fantastic Planet is available from Netflix and other fine video rental services.
For more info, visit Topor e Moi

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Visit www.myspace.com/chancenovaart

Pictures courtesy Chance Nova Art

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