Name: Julia Gfrörer
Age: 26
Country: USA
Website: www.thorazos.net
At which age did you start creating art? And why do you feel compelled to create?
When I was about five or six I saw a cartoon where a girl was bitten by a snake, and I was so fascinated by the idea of being bitten by a poisonous snake and passing out in tall grass that I did a lot of drawings of myself in that situation, which I hid. I remember feeling like they were secret and I should be ashamed of them. I think since then I've always drawn pictures of things that make me uneasy to try and understand them. When I was a teenager I carried a sketchbook around all the time, and people would ask to look through it, so I got used to the idea that I was going to draw whatever unpleasant things I was thinking about, and people were going to look at them and either go, "Uh, that's weird," or "Oh, me too." You also get to experience the thing that you draw in a voyeuristic way, so I draw something dead to understand finality, or I draw an injury to feel how it hurts.
What are you inspired by? And who do you look up to?
Anytime something makes me uncomfortable or grossed out I start thinking about ways to put that feeling into my drawings. The scene in The Shining where the elevator doors open and blood gushes out influenced me a lot. Nan Goldin's self-portrait after being beaten, Chris Burden's "Shoot", and Marc Quinn's self-portrait sculptures, cast in his own frozen blood. And the part in Rosemary's Baby when she says, "This is no dream. This is really happening."
Which influential artist would you like to ask for advice?
I'd like to consult some other fine artists who do representational drawing, How do you keep it from being stodgy? How many hours a week do you practice? How do you get your models to sit still? Do you ever cheat, and what counts as cheating? How do/did you convince people that representational art is still a thing, that it's not just for illustration? How do you keep believing that all the time? Why do you bother when it's so time consuming and you could just take a photo? And who do you wish you could draw like? I would ask Graham Little, Paul van Dongen, Jenny Saville, and Lucien Freud these things. If any of you are reading, feel free to let me know at thorazos@gmail.com.
If you had to put up one piece of artwork on your wall and stare at it for a year, who would it be by and why?
Chloe Piene is one of my very favorite artists, and her drawing "Sleeper 02 (Vintage Hat)" is pretty amazing to me right now. If I stared at that for a year I could probably learn a lot.
Tell us about your creative process.
Unless I'm drawing a still life or someone who doesn't mind modeling, I start a drawing by taking photos, or rummaging online for reference images. I'm still learning which photos make good drawings. Usually they are not very good photos. Why bother drawing a good photo? I make a couple of faint guide lines, then just hurl the drawing down as decisively as possible. I almost never erase--my lines are too dark and I'm too impatient--so if the drawing is going poorly I just throw it out. When it looks done, I take it outside to spray it with fixative, then add color with colored pencils or gouache. This process takes about an hour, and I like to do two or three drawings at a time. Usually they'll all be of the same thing.
My boyfriend and I are very poor and share a tiny one-bedroom apartment, so I don't really have a studio right now, but lately most of my work is pretty small, so I can draw on the couch, in bed, at the kitchen table, or at a cafe. My drawing posture is the worst possible: hunched over a piece of paper balanced on my knees, with the pencil held as for writing, exactly as you're not supposed to do.
Do you ever find weird connections between life and art?
Since I love to draw minor injuries, acquaintances are always offering to show me their rashes, scabs, scars, bruises and birth defects. My nine-year-old sister said I should change my URL to "people's requests about their deformed arm dot com." Mangled persons of the world: I would love to draw you, but not right now.
As an artist, are you technical or passionate?
My inner monologue is incessantly and uselessly critical, so I make a specific effort not to over-think. Lately I've been listening to This American Life while I draw, which enables my eye and hand make the decisions and my brain to stay out of it. I do put a lot of analytical thought into my projects, but once the pencil is in my hand, I work as intuitively as possible.
How do you determine when a work is finished? Or is it ever finished?
I dislike going back to old projects or tinkering with things excessively, so once I set a drawing down I won't pick it up again. But I usually don't know whether it's a good drawing until a few days or weeks later, when I look at it with fresh eyes. If it isn't, I throw it away and try again.
Do you think there are boundaries you would never cross in your art making?
A man once tried to commission some works of erotic self-portraiture from me, an offer which I considered, but ultimately declined.
Do you have any magic cures for creative blocks?
Nothing foolproof, I'm afraid, but a good lay and some sleep can help.
Which of your own works are you most proud of/ is most meaningful to you and why?
A portrait of my friend Emma, done the day after she was beaten up by a girl whose boyfriend she had slept with. I put the drawing on the postcard for my show "He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead." We haven't spoken at all since I moved out of Seattle, which is my fault, but I still love Emma and I have the drawing on my wall, and she was so beautiful and sad and proud with that black eye.
In 2007 I drew portraits of every man I knew at that time, which came out to a little over seventy men, as Sir Lancelot, each wearing his red-and-white striped coat of arms. I literally worked myself sick for about three months over this enormous project. It was a very cathartic experience which allowed me to get drunk several times a week, hang out with lots of men, pack an opening to the gills, become very good at portraiture, and ultimately completely turn my life upside down. It's the biggest single project I've done and I'm really proud of that.
Which art mediums and brands do you prefer to use?
My pencil drawings are normally on Rising Stonehenge paper, or Magnani Pescia when I can afford it. Lately I've been doing smaller drawings on colored card stocks I got from a paper store I was working at. I like My First Ticonderoga pencils for their fatness, but any graphite pencil will do, and the color is either Prismacolor pencil, china marker or gouache. For comics and ink drawings, my boyfriend calls my gray size 0 (.35 mm) Rapidograph pen my "magic feather," and I do those on regular smooth bristol board.
What kind of art education do you have? Do you think it is important?
I have a BFA in painting and printmaking, and for me it was very important, because I learned my work ethic in college. I also learned to draw properly, which I probably wouldn't have bothered with otherwise.
Is your family supportive of your art? Who influenced and nurtured your creativity most?
The best things my parents did to support my creativity were to teach me to be intellectually curious, and give me lots of space to work my ideas out. My parents also did not express disappointment at my decision to go to art school, which I guess is pretty unusual.
Which direction do you see your art heading in the future?
When I have a studio again, I'd like to start working bigger, and do some more oil paintings. My biggest concern about my art is that it's too pretty, not scary enough, and I think size helps make the drawings more imposing without sacrificing their fragility. I always want my work to be bigger and scarier than it is.
Age: 26
Country: USA
Website: www.thorazos.net
At which age did you start creating art? And why do you feel compelled to create?
When I was about five or six I saw a cartoon where a girl was bitten by a snake, and I was so fascinated by the idea of being bitten by a poisonous snake and passing out in tall grass that I did a lot of drawings of myself in that situation, which I hid. I remember feeling like they were secret and I should be ashamed of them. I think since then I've always drawn pictures of things that make me uneasy to try and understand them. When I was a teenager I carried a sketchbook around all the time, and people would ask to look through it, so I got used to the idea that I was going to draw whatever unpleasant things I was thinking about, and people were going to look at them and either go, "Uh, that's weird," or "Oh, me too." You also get to experience the thing that you draw in a voyeuristic way, so I draw something dead to understand finality, or I draw an injury to feel how it hurts.
What are you inspired by? And who do you look up to?
Anytime something makes me uncomfortable or grossed out I start thinking about ways to put that feeling into my drawings. The scene in The Shining where the elevator doors open and blood gushes out influenced me a lot. Nan Goldin's self-portrait after being beaten, Chris Burden's "Shoot", and Marc Quinn's self-portrait sculptures, cast in his own frozen blood. And the part in Rosemary's Baby when she says, "This is no dream. This is really happening."
Which influential artist would you like to ask for advice?
I'd like to consult some other fine artists who do representational drawing, How do you keep it from being stodgy? How many hours a week do you practice? How do you get your models to sit still? Do you ever cheat, and what counts as cheating? How do/did you convince people that representational art is still a thing, that it's not just for illustration? How do you keep believing that all the time? Why do you bother when it's so time consuming and you could just take a photo? And who do you wish you could draw like? I would ask Graham Little, Paul van Dongen, Jenny Saville, and Lucien Freud these things. If any of you are reading, feel free to let me know at thorazos@gmail.com.
If you had to put up one piece of artwork on your wall and stare at it for a year, who would it be by and why?
Chloe Piene is one of my very favorite artists, and her drawing "Sleeper 02 (Vintage Hat)" is pretty amazing to me right now. If I stared at that for a year I could probably learn a lot.
Tell us about your creative process.
Unless I'm drawing a still life or someone who doesn't mind modeling, I start a drawing by taking photos, or rummaging online for reference images. I'm still learning which photos make good drawings. Usually they are not very good photos. Why bother drawing a good photo? I make a couple of faint guide lines, then just hurl the drawing down as decisively as possible. I almost never erase--my lines are too dark and I'm too impatient--so if the drawing is going poorly I just throw it out. When it looks done, I take it outside to spray it with fixative, then add color with colored pencils or gouache. This process takes about an hour, and I like to do two or three drawings at a time. Usually they'll all be of the same thing.
My boyfriend and I are very poor and share a tiny one-bedroom apartment, so I don't really have a studio right now, but lately most of my work is pretty small, so I can draw on the couch, in bed, at the kitchen table, or at a cafe. My drawing posture is the worst possible: hunched over a piece of paper balanced on my knees, with the pencil held as for writing, exactly as you're not supposed to do.
Do you ever find weird connections between life and art?
Since I love to draw minor injuries, acquaintances are always offering to show me their rashes, scabs, scars, bruises and birth defects. My nine-year-old sister said I should change my URL to "people's requests about their deformed arm dot com." Mangled persons of the world: I would love to draw you, but not right now.
As an artist, are you technical or passionate?
My inner monologue is incessantly and uselessly critical, so I make a specific effort not to over-think. Lately I've been listening to This American Life while I draw, which enables my eye and hand make the decisions and my brain to stay out of it. I do put a lot of analytical thought into my projects, but once the pencil is in my hand, I work as intuitively as possible.
How do you determine when a work is finished? Or is it ever finished?
I dislike going back to old projects or tinkering with things excessively, so once I set a drawing down I won't pick it up again. But I usually don't know whether it's a good drawing until a few days or weeks later, when I look at it with fresh eyes. If it isn't, I throw it away and try again.
Do you think there are boundaries you would never cross in your art making?
A man once tried to commission some works of erotic self-portraiture from me, an offer which I considered, but ultimately declined.
Do you have any magic cures for creative blocks?
Nothing foolproof, I'm afraid, but a good lay and some sleep can help.
Which of your own works are you most proud of/ is most meaningful to you and why?
A portrait of my friend Emma, done the day after she was beaten up by a girl whose boyfriend she had slept with. I put the drawing on the postcard for my show "He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead." We haven't spoken at all since I moved out of Seattle, which is my fault, but I still love Emma and I have the drawing on my wall, and she was so beautiful and sad and proud with that black eye.
In 2007 I drew portraits of every man I knew at that time, which came out to a little over seventy men, as Sir Lancelot, each wearing his red-and-white striped coat of arms. I literally worked myself sick for about three months over this enormous project. It was a very cathartic experience which allowed me to get drunk several times a week, hang out with lots of men, pack an opening to the gills, become very good at portraiture, and ultimately completely turn my life upside down. It's the biggest single project I've done and I'm really proud of that.
Which art mediums and brands do you prefer to use?
My pencil drawings are normally on Rising Stonehenge paper, or Magnani Pescia when I can afford it. Lately I've been doing smaller drawings on colored card stocks I got from a paper store I was working at. I like My First Ticonderoga pencils for their fatness, but any graphite pencil will do, and the color is either Prismacolor pencil, china marker or gouache. For comics and ink drawings, my boyfriend calls my gray size 0 (.35 mm) Rapidograph pen my "magic feather," and I do those on regular smooth bristol board.
What kind of art education do you have? Do you think it is important?
I have a BFA in painting and printmaking, and for me it was very important, because I learned my work ethic in college. I also learned to draw properly, which I probably wouldn't have bothered with otherwise.
Is your family supportive of your art? Who influenced and nurtured your creativity most?
The best things my parents did to support my creativity were to teach me to be intellectually curious, and give me lots of space to work my ideas out. My parents also did not express disappointment at my decision to go to art school, which I guess is pretty unusual.
Which direction do you see your art heading in the future?
When I have a studio again, I'd like to start working bigger, and do some more oil paintings. My biggest concern about my art is that it's too pretty, not scary enough, and I think size helps make the drawings more imposing without sacrificing their fragility. I always want my work to be bigger and scarier than it is.
Posts
oh WOW she must be one of the most interesting artists I have ever read an interview about. I like her view on her art, and obviously - her art itself.
ReplyDeletewow, that was really interesting, thanks for posting this :)
ReplyDeletei really love this girl and her drawings. her comics are so funny and precious. i hope she gets a huge lucrative deal/whatever she wishes for art-wise and huge amounts of cash cos she is worth gold.
ReplyDeleteI love you still as well. It would make me happy to see you again. I pose for another these days. Sometimes when I look up at her I see you. You're the first person who I believed when you said I was beautiful.
ReplyDelete