JESSICA BOSTON: DIGESTIVE MOVEMENT

JESSICA BOSTON (London, 1983)
digestivemovement.blogspot.com
Interview by Roger Omar

FIRST PART

-What relationship is there between cheese and your dreams?

It’s a very serious relationship. I absolutely love cheese more than anything, especially close to bedtime when I have decided to finish my diet for the day and enjoy myself. I try really hard not to because of obvious flabby repercussions, but I’m an addict. I think cheese is so important to my dreams and my life in general. I always notice that my dreams are extra special and vivid when I’ve had cheese for dinner or before a siesta nap. I find that different cheeses give different kinds of dreams. I usually eat Burgos, Mozzarella, Parmesan or Goat, but the good dreams come when I eat the really strong cheeses. I saw on this study that Cheddar enhances dreams about celebrities, Blue Cheese gives you crazy dreams, Red Leicester is likely to have you dwelling on the past and Lancashire will get you focused on the future.

-Why do you write down and illustrate your dreams?

I write them down because I want to remember them. I love having the memory of them, my memory isn’t great, and so I have to count on the dream diaries. When I was younger I used to keep a real diary but rereading them makes me cringe and they can never show how my state of mind is as much as my dreams show. I have been keeping a dream diary for about seven years now. I have extremely bright and colourful dreams, they are full of wonderful unexplainable things. When I read back my dream diaries I remember everything, the colours, the angles I saw the dream from, the places, the people, and how I felt the morning after I had the dream. Even when I reread dreams that happened ages ago I still see what I saw in the dream very clearly.

-Is what you write true to what you see in your dreams or does it get transformed?

Things do get lost by the morning sometimes if I wake up go to the loo or Nachi’s alarm will go off, I’ll fall back asleep which means I will lose a lot of detail. I don’t like to exaggerate or make things up or it would lose its truth and that is really important to me. I don’t want it to become fantasy I want it to stay honest, it would be fiction if I embellished and its not fiction or reality, its something else, something much more exciting. The problem  with writing down your dreams is that they are so hard to explain even with the drawings, because you can write down for example ‘I am at my house’, but first of all a lot of people haven’t been to my house and don’t know what its like, or it could be my house but at the same time, not be my house, or just feel like its my house… and when it comes to people and their personal details it can become very difficult because it can read for example ‘my friends husband’, but is it her husband in the dream or in real life? I don’t want to put brackets after everything I write because that can become heavy to read, so I just leave it open to interpretation.

-What part of your dreams get lost in the process of writing them down?

The dreams are never going to be a hundred percent accurate, but I am very disciplined about getting it all down when I wake up, in the first five minutes of waking you lose 50 percent of your dream and in the first ten minutes you will lose 90 percent of it. Small things do get lost, or sometimes I can’t remember the bit that connects one part of the dream to the other. I have four or five separate dreams a night and I fall back asleep and in the morning sometimes I forget a chunk of dream. When I wake up I usually go running to my computer and type like crazy everything I can remember. It’s like pulling a thread, I remember something and suddenly the whole dream falls into my head and I feel relieved. I like to spend the morning re-going through the dream. Every detail and trying to figure out what it was about. Even if it is a terrible nightmare I like to rework my way through it and figure it out. I actually really enjoy the process of breaking down a nightmare and trying to understand why it frightened me.

-Have you come to understand yourself better thanks to the habit of writing your dreams down?

Definitely, sometimes the dreams are so obvious to me and with pop psychology I can figure out why I feel that way and why they come up. There are certain themes that always come up and they are still silly things that I haven’t dealt with properly and in my day to day I don’t tend to think about, but at night it’s my brain trying to make sense of it and figure it out. I don’t really believe in dream dictionaries, each one has a different interpretation and I think the answers they give are a bit generic, and dreams aren’t that easy and are so personal to each person. I also never take my dreams as predictions of the future or important signs of anything – I’m not mental. I do have de-ja- vus all the time though. I mean, a huge percentage of people dreamt in black and white when television was in black in white, it just means they were influenced by what they saw. I don’t think mine are ever so random that they shock me. The dreams are full of my anxieties and likes as well as dislikes. I often dream about my old boarding school, which seems to mean I have a lot of unresolved issues there, but this is something I already know.

-Are there objects and people that you have dream about so much that they have turned into symbols? What are they? What do they mean?

There are objects that come up a lot and I know what they mean, when I dream about these things I always have to check myself and make sure I’m not getting overtired or stressed. There is a girl I went to school with and she made things difficult for me there, whenever I’m overstressed I dream that she’s back in my life and messing things up for me. I always dream about things at work going wrong when I’m under pressure. When I used to work on Harry Potter set driving the actors around on golf buggies, I would always dream I was crashing the really expensive golf buggies into walls or getting shouted at by directors (both things that happened). Now that I work as a model booker I constantly dream about the models. I also know that dreaming about small animals running all over my body and biting me is a control thing. I also dream about gaining weight and having weird teeth or having saggy boobs, these things are so personal and say so much about me but I choose to share them. Also dreaming about the house I grew up in Vauxhall is a big reoccurring dream for me, it comes up whenever I’m sad or worried. I’m back in that house and it is always dark and dimly lit because a lot of dark things happened in that house. My family always thought the house was haunted, because it attracted a lot of resentful and bad energy. The dreams there always leave me feeling confused and in them there is a ghost I can feel there with me.

-How was “Digestive Movement” born?

I’ve had these journals for so long and I had been thinking for a long time about what to do with them. The thing with dreams is they are not something people really want to listen to or find particularly interesting because they aren’t real life to a lot of people so its not important. Whenever I tell my dad a dream I’ve had about him, his eyes start to roll like he’s going unconscious, so I take the hint. I had to find a way to talk about my dreams without saying them out loud and illustrating is the best way as they are such a visual thing its better to illustrate them than to talk about them. I had done some illustrations on the computer, one was of this dream I had where the moon was a chocolate digestive biscuit being held up by the hand of god, and an alien spaceship in the shape of a dog flew alongside it, it all took place in Chinatown. I did the piece with computer and I thought it looked pretty cool, but it was not quick enough, it needed to be more urgent otherwise the dream could get lost, so I drew it by hand.  It got the name Digestive Movement because when I was about twelve, I was telling a friend of my mums who at the time was a colonic irrigationist about my dreams and she said that’s just overactive digestive movement. I felt kind of relieved that in a way that’s all it was.

-Which people close to you do you most tell your dreams to? Do they like them?

I usually tell them to my mum as she’s one of the few people that will listen, first she tells me her dreams which are usually about her and our old beloved family dog Julie (who died about three years ago). In the dreams Julie is usually flying through the air and then meets up with Jesus Christ or San Antonio (Saint Anthony), or she dreams about when her and my dad were staying in the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay at the time of the terrorist attack. It was very traumatic for them and me and my sisters, so since that happened she relives from time to time and wakes up very scared. It’s not surprising it was the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. So I tell her mine and she tells me hers. I don’t think anyone ever really likes or understands them in the same way as I do. I tell my sister Rachel as well as I dream about her a lot. The other day a friend I had grown a bit apart from sent me an email, telling me about a wonderful dream he had had, I thought that was so lovely, it was such a personal thing. I tell them to my boyfriend as well and he listens because he’s really sweet, we have a quick exchange, but he has really dull dreams about pushing refrigerators or talking to friends, we always laugh at how really really boring they are.

-Imagine your own dream theme park: Digestive Movement Park. Describe the main attractions, people, scenes.

Don’t get me excited! Digestive Movement the theme park would definitely be the worlds best theme park, the main ride which would be a massive water slide where you go down through a complicated intestine and there would be cinema screens on either side and moving dream dolls and sounds, and you would be fighting through objects from my dreams along with bits of undigested cheese and my dinner, the water would be coloured and have glitter in it, and you would have to go through the intestine in a swimming costume. It would be like the Its a small world ride in Disney World at a water park with singing dolls but in a massive colon full of cheese, it actually sounds pretty gross!

-Pick a word from your own dream dictionary and explain the consequences of dreaming about it.

Guinea pigs = Are a big reoccurring one. When I was little I had five guinea pigs, the first one was called Ginger and was murdered by being starved (not by my family) and then I had two Peruvian grey longhairs, a mother and a baby called Molly and Mandy and I thought that was really funny because my mother is called Mily, it wasn’t that funny. My mother used to wash their hair about three times a week. They always smelt really good. Then we got another one called Elvis and a friend of my family known as the guinea pig man who lived in a dirty flat in Vauxhall with fifty guinea pigs running around his feet gave us another one called Baby to keep Elvis company. I always dream about guinea pigs running all over my body or I can’t chase them. I had a really horrible dream where I was strangling them because they were biting me and trying to kill me. I was trying to break their necks, there was blood everywhere. I know that when I have no control over the guinea pigs it is because at that point I feel like I have no control over my life.

-Write your dream from 9/April/2010 here: 

Colin Farrell is planning to kill my sister Rachel and I. We are on a boat and are being smuggled away. We are now in a shop run by Chinese people that have a Moroccan mud hut round the back of the store that looks over a mountain and a green grassy field. As we continue walking through the mud hut we get to a tennis court that turns into a train station. I whisper to my sister ‘these men are doing drugs’, I tell her that ‘you can tell because you have to look closer, at the things around you. What looks like tarantulas on the mountain is actually if you look closer blood moving, and what looks like baby frogs sitting on top of the frogs on the floor, are actually hats on the frogs’. I am eating a huge bowl of ice cream and two very bossy Chinese women come in the room I am in and tell me to throw the rest away. I give my bowl to Nachi and say put the rest in the fridge, they throw glitter and washing up liquid on the ice cream.

SECOND PART

-Do you feel represented by your way to draw? Does it form a part of the way you value and appreciate your life? 

I do, I think the way I draw represents me and everything I’m about. I mean, I guess I draw like I am; loud, colourful, rude, naive and flawed. I think drawing gives me purpose, it’s my freedom and my outlet and I do it for myself, not for anyone else. I mean, you work all week and then when you come home you want to have something that’s your own and you just enjoy.

-How has changing your residence and being in Catalunya influenced your work? 

I think the main way in which I’ve changed is that being here has made me want to do things and value myself more. I was really insecure when I lived in London, I was so nervous about myself and apologetic. In London you step on someone’s toe and they beg you for forgiveness, that kind of over polite nervousness makes me shaky. I still really appreciate the British politeness but I also really appreciate honesty and I think there’s something a lot more honest about Spain, everyone’s a lot more direct. I feel like the people around me aren’t afraid to be themselves whether it’s good or bad, maybe it’s that or maybe I was just six years younger when I lived in London.

-Why are you attracted to images that reference childhood? 

I loved my childhood. I guess when I was a child I wanted to be all grown up and now I’m older I think of myself as a large child. I had a huge imagination that was sometimes too much but it has gotten less overwhelming and more stable and that’s probably why I love dreaming so much, because I get more and more of it back. I lose a little bit of my imagination as I get older and with dreaming I am channelling my inner kid.

-What aspects of your childhood have you kept in your adult life? 

Pretty much all of them. All the good bits at least; like having chocolate for breakfast or spending all my money on toys and booze, well I didn’t spend my money as a child on booze but I mean in the sense that I can do what I want, and not be told what to do or that I have to go to bed, or take a bath or that I’ve watched too much TV. Listening to my favourite music, cartoon theme tunes on my mp3 is something that is a huge luxury and I always dreamed of the day I would be able to do that. I haven’t changed very much since I was a little girl; I still wear the same clothes, high tops, leggings, bows and glitter. My flat is full of toys and things to play with like my bedroom was when I was little. Growing up is boring; you have to make it fun otherwise it’s all money, Ikea and bullshit. When you are a kid, you don’t think so much about what you are doing, you do something and it is right; it is usually your first instinct and that is best. When you get older you start questioning yourself and everything you do so much, it loses the spontaneity and a lot of the magic. I hope I’m not coming across like an untalented Michael Jackson, it’s just being a kid was more fun.

-Are your expectations of life as vivid and abundant as your dreams? 

Yes, I want my life to be interesting and colourful and fun. I want it to be full of funny stories, interesting characters and sex and animals (not together), and mysteries that need solving.

-Why do you give importance to porno, punk and amateur? 

I don’t give importance to being amateur; I just am amateur. I like naive works like Tahitian voodoo art, Indian art and Venezuelan art. I grew up around these kinds of works as my dad is basically Indian and my mum is Venezuelan. I see those influences in my drawings. As for porno it’s something that’s always been around me, that’s why I chose those two images for the logo on my website, because I am a mixture of innocence and sexual curiosity. In my work, I want to transmit that feeling of when you are a kid and you don’t know anything about anything but you are learning all these new things that are blowing your mind like seeing a sex scene on the telly, or reading your dad’s dirty magazine collection with a friend. I used to go up to the top room of my house in Vauxhall all the time and read this book my dad had called Sex in Cartoons. I remember thinking it was awesome and really stimulating, I mean cartoons were my life, I used to wake up in the mornings on a Saturday at about 4.00am and go downstairs and watch all of them. First were the Russian cartoons on channel 4, then the Australian cartoons, then all the mainstream ones, then the cable channels like Nickelodeon and then one out of my collection of vhs’ my dad had recorded for me, so to see a cartoon in this format of being all sexy and confusing was something I had never seen before and I never looked back.

-What is your answer in a party when people come up to you and ask what you draw? 

Someone will usually say something for me, and they’ll usually say ‘she draws transsexuals’. It depends, I’m not great at talking about my work on the spot and I don’t really bring it up, because I don’t know how. I prefer not to say too much and hear what people think.

-Your drawings are tender and phallic, comic and likeable. Are imperfection and humour, mirrors by which to reflect humanity?

Thank you, that’s such a nice thing to say. I don’t know if they are mirrors by which to reflect humanity, but I do think that if more people had more of a sense of humour the world would be a more pleasant place to be. A lack of sense of humour causes really extreme behaviour and that’s something that’s scary in this day and age. Imperfection and humour also tend to go well together.

I am in a big house with a big swimming pool, the house has an assistant and he loves my drawings, next door to my house lives a family of black people and they have their own cult. I go over to see the house two of the girls come out and greet me, they are twins and they both share a huge afro, they are carrying a fat silver Japanese baby which has an eyeball balloon in its hand, we all take a look up in the air at a storm and there is lightening over our heads, in the street where we live there are chickens in cages, there is a cage of angry, bright orange mice. The twins chase me through the house, I find my sister Becky hiding in a party upstairs, it is a party for MTV and Hollyoaks, on the wall there are posters, they say “Who is Coby Curie? we must expose him…” Becky and I take one off the walls, a blonde tall man comes up to us, he is angry about something but he tells me he loves Becky. The room is full of people dressed up in fancy expensive clothes and lots of make up, there are a group in the corner wearing army clothes with holes exposing private areas, they have busted up mouths and eyes. I go out onto a terrace and jump over the side of it onto the rocks. 09/07/2010

I am at a party at night in a large cafe, it is full of people I don’t recognize. The party is going to go on all night. Nachi is there and he is insulting an MTV presenter, he has a fake leg and Nachi is insulting him. I live outside of where the party is, in a guinea pig hutch, I tell Nachi he can’t live with me anymore because I am embarrased by his behaviour in front of the MTV presenter. 17/02/2011

-Are your drawings and your aesthetic preferences similar?

My drawings and aesthetic preferences are exactly the same. I love colourful things covered in glitter and are a bit funny.

-Would you like your drawings if you had not done them? 

I think I would, I think I would take them for what they are.

-It seems fundamental to you that your drawings are done with your hands, and that behind them an imperfect person. You don’t conform to one style and you enjoy mistreating proportions and perspective. Why do you grant yourself this freedom? 

I think I grant myself this freedom with everything, why strive for perfection if you are never going to achieve it? Without sounding like a total dick what’s a perfect painting or person anyway, and who gets to decide it. I used to be obsessed with being physically perfect and it drove me crazy, and I never achieved it and I don’t want that anymore. I’ve been drawing since forever and I’ve never got any better at it or figured it out, not to say I don’t try – I do and very hard and I do get better at perspectives but I feel like it’s not the most important thing, so much of getting it correct is still important to me but the perspective doesn’t seem to be. It’s more about getting something across. It’s like with my Spanish, I’ve been speaking Spanish forever, my mum is Venezuelan, my boyfriend is Spanish and I still make so many mistakes and say so many silly things and these mistakes make me and my boyfriend laugh. Maybe I’m just a bit slow, but I communicate well and people understand me and laugh with me, and maybe sometimes at me but I don’t care. I guess the same could be said for my drawings. I mean I learnt Spanish with my mum and it was never about grammar or technicalities, it was just about speaking to my Venezuelan cousins. The same with drawing, when I was little it was about doing something fun with my Granny and her getting to show them off later. She was never strict with me on dimensions and getting it right, it was always about being charming and expressing myself.

-Do you feel misunderstood by other artists? 

Not really by other artists in particular.

-Mention some of your favourite artists.

I have lots but that would take forever so I will name a couple. My dad has a lot of beautiful Indian paintings including a couple of Jamini Roy’s that were left to him by his father, I really love these paintings. I recently read Aline Crumb’s book ‘Need More Love’ and I fell in love with her, when I finished I sent her an email telling her how much I had loved her book, and told her I thought we had things in common because I like to draw, have a massive bum and a grumpy boyfriend. She wrote me back saying thank you with a sweet message. I thought that was so nice and it really cheered me up, she is so humble and lovely and real. I love Henry Darger and his amazing imagination and a friend of mine recently put me on to Alan Moore’s novels and I’m not sure how I let that slip by me for so long but it rocked my socks. I appreciate a lot of artists but I like them even better when they are my friends and they are lovely, like Martin Cole, Jose 3501, Manu Griñon, Mike Swaney, Enrique Doza and his projects at his gallery Tienda Derecha and MISCELANEA, comic book artist Sergi Puyol, Carlos Carbonell and his music group Internet2 and my other favourite music group ¡PELEA!

-What things of your character do you like to see reflected in others?

When I see too much of myself reflected in other people I usually find them really annoying, but I do like people to be good humoured, open minded and respectful of other people.

-Is there anything important that your parents have forgiven you or you to them?

I forgive my parents everything and anything, concrete events happen to everyone but I don’t want to talk about mine. My parents are really good to me and they are really special people and they do everything for me with good intentions and they are my best friends. My family is so important to me and a lot of things have happened but we always try and laugh it up and see the funny side.

-If you had to choose, you would prefer to have eyes or a mouth?

That is so tough, if I have eyes and no mouth, maybe I would see all these great things and not be able to talk about it, but then maybe I could draw all the time and just draw and write everything down, but to only have a mouth? Hmmm, in that case I could dream and talk about it. I think I would want the eyes, I would want to see and if I had no mouth I could become extremely beautiful and thin.

THIRD PART

-Have you ever in your “real life” used any of your dreams as currency?

No not so far, I would be very happy to dream for money and never wake up and have that be my job. I constantly dream I am being given big sums of money and wake up disappointed.

-You make reference to the real identity of the people that appear in your dreams. Do you want them to know? Is it a way of communicating with them with a wink?

Yeah, I do reference a lot of people by their full names. Most of these people from my past I am doubtful follow my web or know that I do this; so far no one has been in contact about it. I like to know when someone has dreamt about me especially if it was ages ago that I last saw them, so for me it’s my way of saying hey, I guess you’re still in there lurking around my brain.

-Are your dreams a contribution to your life? Do they influence your real life?
Yeah, when I have an amazing dream I think about it all the time, all through the day. I try and relieve the feelings they gave me, whether I died, or felt pain. Recently, I had a dream about my old family dog Julie and I felt like I could smell her hair and feel its soft curlyness on my fingers. When I woke up I was tearful; I missed her so much, it hurt. It may have been a dream but I still lived it, I felt things, I saw things, so yeah, in my life I’m just a normal boring person that doesn’t do anything particularly exciting but when I’m sleeping I just go wherever with no plans, no idea what’s going to happen for the next ten hours.

-Do you dream often with celebrities (singers, actors, artists)? What is your relationship with the people you most dream about?

I do dream about famous people quite a lot, the thing about that which is complicated for Digestive Movement is that some of the famous people I dream about I have met or have known at some point. Obviously, the majority I haven’t met, but having met or known them complicates the dream because it means the famous person is not totally random and it gives a different meaning to the dream. Colin Farrell seems to come up a lot, about six years ago I worked as a runner on Alexander the movie carrying around coffee cups in the desert. When I first got there I wasn’t very impressed by him, but his Irish charm seems to have seeped into my subconscious. Since I’ve been with my boyfriend he doesn’t come up much, I mean I don’t know him anymore. The reason I brought that up is there are certain celebrities I dream about who have more connection to my life than others, as with people that aren’t famous. Celebrities I don’t seem to have any connection with come up quite a lot and this always makes me change my mind about them for better or worse…and nothing will change your mind about someone like a sex dream, especially that really inappropriate dream I had about the King of Spain.

-When shown a dream, how do you choose the scene to illustrate?

Well, the dreams I tend to illustrate are mine, so I choose them based on different reasons, it will usually be the part of the dream that most stuck in my head when I woke up or is most visually interesting or symbolic.

-You have very good memory to remember your dreams and provide a lot of written details, which are very visual. Did you write stories or a journal before you started writing your dreams?

I used to keep a diary but they are so embarrassing most of them have been burnt or kept in secret hiding places, wherever I live. I used to try writing short stories but they were terrible too, I think I communicate better with drawings than with words.

-Do you know other people, artists, who have the habit of recording their dreams?

I don’t know any other people personally that write down their dreams but I’d recommend it.

-Do you share your dreams with people you want?

Digestive Movement is all about me sharing them without forcing them on people.

-What dream did you have where you’ve not wanted to wake up?

There are loads I’ve not wanted to wake up from. I usually set my alarm and snooze it for a couple of hours, every time the snooze goes I try and carry the dream from where it finished (lucidly). I had a dream recently where I was sitting on top of an extremely muscly black man who was lying down on the floor of a shopping mall. He was wearing gold spandex leggings and I sat on top of him, a circle of people stood around us watching. I woke up thinking: Why did that have to end? That was too exciting.

*

IN YOUR DREAMS:

-What has been the most deplorable physical state in which you have dreamed?

The other week I had a dream that Nachi had broken my heart. He was so cruel to me in the dream, I felt that my heart was empty and I felt totally abandoned and shocked because it was so out of the blue. In the morning, I felt breathless and was alone at work that day and I actually started crying. This sounds like the confessions of a nutter, I mean I already knew that Nachi is very important to me, but I felt like I had lost him, I can tell the difference between dreams and reality, I knew it hadn’t happened but it was one of the most horrible dreams I’ve ever had.

-What is the age you most regularly appear as?

I’m not even sure who I am in my dreams; one second I’m me and the next second I’m a young Chinese boy, so I don’t usually know how old I am.

-What is the most terrifying time you have died?

I die all the time but for me worse than dying are dreams of my life having been ruined. The other week I dreamt I murdered someone. I was accused of murdering Julia Babbage who was my best friend as a child. I was told I was going to go to jail. I stole a scrapbook from a frightening bald man’s bedroom. He was Julia’s husband so I got the book and run down to a crowd of people in a square. My parents and I were sleeping in the street being protected by people, I saw Jay (a friend I used to know) then I saw Julia; she is dead. I asked her to tell me who murdered her, I was crying, I told her that we grew up together and we have a past, we were like family, she was crying, she hinted it was her husband’s brother. I saw two men in a car driving past; they are looking for the book and me, I saw my mum, she is at an ice cream shop. As the dream was happened I had a feeling my life was over.

-What powers do you have?

I don’t usually have any reoccurring powers in my dream, but I do have the power to lucid dream, which is quite useful.

-What are your fears?

The worst ones are that something happens to my family. Recently, I was sleeping and I woke up abruptly screaming and flailing my arms and legs; I was hysterical. Nachi was trying to wake me and was wondering what was wrong with me. I had seen the open mouth of an octopus and he had a lot of teeth.

© All illustrations by Jessica Boston.

MAAIKE VERWIJS

MAAIKE VERWIJS (Born in Roosendaal, 1986)
Graduated in 2008 from Academy for Art and Design St. Joost.
www.maaikeverwijs.com
Interview by Roger Omar / December 2010.

ººº

-How many times have you moved from house? I have moved four times, I grew up in a small town and when my parents got divorced we moved to another house in the same village. Some time later we moved to a slightly bigger town. When I started artschool it didn’t take me long before I found a room in Breda. At a certain point the room next to mine was vacant and I invited a friend to come and live next to me. One thing led to another and after about a year we moved to a bigger appartment. Now we’re still living there with our two cats, Isis and Baas (dutch for Boss because he rules the house).

-Did you leave in any of these houses a significant history that you´d like to recover? I don’t know if I’d like to recover anything, but I do have good memories of when I moved to live on my own in the room in Breda. I had the most beautiful room in the house (in my opinion of course) High ceiling, large dormer windows that opened to the view of an old church across the road and lots of trees in our street. I loved it although the house was very drafty and it smelled a bit like old people.

-Do you have any strong wish that would be easier to accomplish if you lived in another country or you had another body? Not really, I think I have been very lucky to have been given the chances that I got here in the Netherlands. Being able to study for instance and having some help getting started as a professional illustrator. But that being said, the climate is changing over here and art is something people have very different opinions about and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to continue to work with the same optimism.

-Why? Connecting to some feeling of discontent about society in the general population, some politicians have adopted some different ideas, like the idea that art is a left wing hobby. As a result of this plus the general idea that we need to economise, the already small budget for art is probably going to get even smaller. The most worrying is the idea that art is seen as useless by these people, serving no purpose…

You could say that my wish is to work in a positive environment together with talented people. Maybe at some time I’ll move to another country to try and find such an environment.

-How did you start to draw? For as far as I know I’ve always been drawing, I guess I used to draw a lot of pictures when I was younger and I continued drawing as I got older. I guess it has something to do with a basic need to create. It seemed to be in my nature.

Maaike working in her appartment in Breda.

Crazy nighttime experiment with the Pentax camera.

-Can you describe your drawing style? Clearly defined lines and a colorful palette. Themes that seem to reoccur are fears, danger, storytelling, cinema, dreams and despair. I like to tell a whole story with a single image.

-Does this drawing style talks about your personality? Drawing is a part of my personality, but I don’t know if my personality is expressed very accurate in my drawings. It’s not really a question I am concerned with. Looking at a picture is always very subjective, I might read a totally different message than someone else might. Still I think there must be some connection, but it is a very elusive connection and is hard to define.

-What´s your process for an illustration? The process for every illustration is different and it’s continually changing. But there are some things I think I always do the same, like collecting information and searching for reference images beforehand. I do this for every illustration. It inspires me and gives me ideas to incorporate in the illustration. And very much connected to the profession of illustration (or any other artform maybe) is the moment during the design process when everything seems hopeless and futile. I regularly experience this myself and I don’t know how I manage to overcome this every time somehow.

-Have you imposed yourself some discipline in your professional work or are you more likely to move by casualities? I find it very hard to work on regular times, it’s always some sort of struggle to find a balance between relaxation and work. I have tried working on specific hours but somehow I prefer to work in the evening or the nighttime. So that’s what I’m doing right now. And there’s always something to be done, so I just contemplate on a couple of things; what is most urgent, what would I like to work on, or are there other things beside work that need attention?

-How did you start drawing your own dreams? What is so interesting about them? I started writing down my dreams in highschool. I’ve also drawn some of them during that time. But I rediscovered it at Artschool, basically I found some of my dreams so bizarre, disturbing or amazing I wanted to draw them and I made a series of five drawings.

I think dreams are a strange and intriguing fenomenen. It might sound very cliché to say dreams are so interesting because they offer us a window or a view into the subconscious. But let’s not forget what that means. Somehow through your dreams you are able to learn about yourself, your desires, fears and fantasies, and the same goes for cinema. Both these things are not considered to be part of reality. Film is a representation of reality and dreams somehow take place in another realm of consciousness. But I find they are very important in learning about what it means to be human. In this way dreams offers us a crucial dimension of reality.

-What regular dream-subjects do you already recognize as personal symbols? I don’t really keep track, there are lots of themes that stop by once in a while. For instance I can remember not too long ago I had two dreams, both about my hands. Both dreams involved slicing/cutting open my hands. There are other horrible nightmares I suddenly begin to remember, every now and then I have a terrible nightmare about my cats, finding them dead or being mistreated etc.

-Do you still have a relation with your childhood friends? Do you dream about them? I don’t have many friends from back then. But sometimes I dream about our old house. I can taste the atmosphere and remember the layout by detail.

-What´s your appearance in dreams? Is it the same image that the mirrow reflects? I think it’s pretty much the same, can’t remember having any weird dreams in which I looked differently. Sometimes I’m more like a spectator in my dreams, not present at the scene but just looking on as things unfold.

-What director, music, location would you choose to film your dreams? Directed by David Lynch, music by Popol Vuh, filmed in a nonspecific desert. I can’t imagine what the result would be like.

-What have you learn about yourself from dreams? My dreams tell me something about my fears and that’s a theme I frequently like to draw about.

-Disaster is also a leitmotiv in your drawings. Is it a personal catharsis or is it more related to the idea of collective destiny? What interests me in this notion of disaster is the moment of despair, when everything seems so different from everyday life all of a sudden. You cannot believe it’s happening for real, I haven’t actually experienced a lot of disaster myself (luckily!) But I think you could compare it to seeing someone getting hit by a car for instance. So I think it is connected to the same thing I find so interesting about dreams, thinking about experiencing reality in different ways.

-How does nature influences your work? Human nature is something I am very fascinated by. It’s an infinite source of inspiration and confusion.

-Do you have any special trait that works great with your artwork but not so good with your social life? Sitting inside and watching movies all day works well for doing art and getting inspiration but it’s not beneficial to my social life.

-Have your parents changed your idea of art at any moment? My parents are pretty clueless when it comes to art.

-And what about art-school? Did it influence your way of understanding art? Certainly my time at artschool helped me to develop my personal taste. It also helped me to understand and appreciate more complex or conceptual works of art.

-Did you learn in art-school a way to promote/sell your images? How is this working right now? Yes, this was quite a big topic, but I think it demotivated me because they were focusing on the difficult part, turning it into a problem before we even tried. I think I’m doing quite well right now.  My work is given a lot of attention and appreciation on the internet, I’m illustrating for Ode magazine and for Univers, university newspaper for the University of Tilburg… And I’m working on my own project, a pop-up book that might be published in the future.

-A pop-up book! How did you come up with this idea? It’s always a surprise to open a pop-up book, to see the parts moving. I wanted to know more about the technique, see if I would be able to make some pop-ups of my own. This was the initial idea and along the way I came up with the Aztec theme. I have thought about the theme for a very long time, trying to come up with the perfect story and concept. At a certain point I became interested in Aztec mythology, the human sacrifices and the story of the Spanish conquest.

-Aztec visuals comprehend storytelling and sacred symbolism. Is this related to your book? There isn’t a parallel story, the Aztec mythology is the main thing I wanted to show, and I loved the Aztec art so much I wanted to use it and give my own interpretation. My book is mainly about the different gods and their myths. But I’m also dedicating some pages on Aztec customs. Giving an overview of the Aztec culture in a unique way. So in a way it will be an educational book. But not in the traditional sense I think. I’ll be telling about the myths in detail and making reference to other Mesoamerican cultures. In essence it’s my interpretation of Aztec culture. I also wanted to use different pop-up techniques, so that every page will be different.

-How do you plan each page? I think every page should have something else to offer, so I try to vary the use of pop-up techniques. And of course every page has a different story to tell, I’m planning on making ten pages. The themes or gods I’m certain about are the myth of Huitzilopochtli and Coatlicue, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, Xipe Totec and practise of flaying, the New Fire ritual, the custom of drawing blood, Quetzalcoatl and also the Aztec underworld: Mictlan.

-Do you make a lot of cutouts, tests, photocopies? What is the manual process for this book? It’s somewhat different with each pop-up. First I pick a god or myth or custom I want to draw and think about the various figures and their placement in the pop-up. Then I set about making a working pop-up in which there’s room for everything. When I get the final working version I break it apart and draw the various elements with the exact measurements on a piece of paper. I also indicate the exact place where the elements should be placed on the backing sheet. Then I start sketching on the backing sheet and on the elements the figures and other things that I want to draw. I work on this for a while and make it into a final pen drawing. Often I use waterbased ink for colouring. I might rebuild the pop-up several times during the design process and in the end I always work on the picture with image editing software.

-How much time have you spent working on this book? Does it already have a title? I’ve been working on it for over a year and it still doesn’t have a title.

-Do you have any favorite artists or inspiring visuals? One of my favorite artists is Brecht van den Broucke, he uses some of the same motives like fear and anxiety. His work has a lot of humour in a satirical way.

Since I’ve been working on the pop-up book I’ve also been reading a lot about the Aztecs. And I’m also very interested in other ancient or foreign cultures. It’s very exciting to discover and read about all these amazing things. Like for instance I stumbled upon some texts about the Tibetan book of death, ‘Bardo Thödol’, which has a part dedicaded to the experience of dying and rebirth. And the other day I came across some pictures of shrunken heads, this is a practise native to the Shaur tribe in the Amazone.

-What artists have helped you to grow and stay faithful to your path? There have been several people who I thought to have important or inspiring messages to share. Lately I’ve seen the documentary on Wesley Willis (Wesley Willis’s joyrides), and this inspired me a great deal. He was a New York based artist who sold drawings on the street. He loved to draw the infrastructure of the city; the cars, streets, busses. Later on he started to make music, also to battle the voices in his head because he suffered from chronic schizophrenia. The way he has led his life is something I think is very admirable and thinking about this helps me to stay true to my path, it reminds me it doesn’t always have to be so difficult and that I should enjoy myself while doing art.

© ALL IMAGES BY MAAIKE VERWIJS.

BRIAN GUBICZA

I PARKED MY CAR, BOUGHT SOME SUSHI AND RAN INTO A NAZI YOUTH RALLY ON A NEW JERSEY BOARDWALK. THEIR FACES WERE PAINTED WHITE LIKE MIMES.

JEN (MY WIFE) ASSASSINATED HITLER BACKSTAGE AT A PLAY. SHE WAS LATER FOUND (BY THE JUDGE) TO BE "NOT GUILTY".

JEN BOARDED A BUS TO THE HOSPITAL. SHE GAVE BIRTH; CLONED THE CHILD, AND LEFT WITH A BAG FULL OF MONEY (HAVING SOLD BOTH CHILDREN).

I DISCOVERED A CRYPTIC MESSAGE. SUBMERGING THE PAPER (IN A SMALL POOL) REVEALED A MAP. RUNNING THROUGH TRAFFIC, I ARRIVED AT A HOUSE. I QUICKLY GREW TOO LARGE AND BECAME TRAPPED INSIDE.

A WOMAN FELL FROM A GREAT HEIGHT. ETRUSCAN TEMPLE CAKE. THERE WAS A FREAK IN ATTENDANCE AT THE PARTY.

BRIAN GUBICZA (1976, USA)

http://goobeetsa.com/

-What motivated you to illustrate your dreams? Dreams fascinate me and I am an illustrator. I started a dream journal in college and have been scribbling and sketching since. The mix of the bizarre and mundane seems to be a good fit with my developing world view.

-Along with the illustration you include a short and poetic text that describes the dream and complements the image. How did you come up with this synthesis form? Maybe it comes from watching films with subtitles? Or perhaps from reading too many comics? With both examples the addition of text seems to create a hybrid that is greater than text or image alone.

-This synopsis seem to focus in characters and actions, leaving behind your emotions associated with the dreams. Why? Is action enough to tell a story? This seems to me to be a simplification concerning the power of the written word. To me, there is emotion behind all action… and meaning is largely subjective.  The synopsis serves as a guide, but it is never without emotion.  Like the illustration, the words exist for interpretation by a thinking/feeling audience.

-What other elements (importants in your dreams) do you necessarily leave behind to write such small synopsis? Each illustration is planned as a small sequence or moment from a dream of several written paragraphs in my journal.  I look for the moment of surreality. If I find interest and am compelled to create an illustration, someone may be compelled to explore it.

-In your dream illustrations you use very syntethic elements typical of graphic design. Most of the figures are skeletons that you characterize with different colors and costumes. Why do you prefer geometrical forms and insist in simplicity? When you break objects down to simple forms, they become wonderfully complex. Everybody jumps inside!  The “skeletons” and costumes speak about the love for play and my childhood nostalgia for Playmobil.  When creating an illustration, It is very much like moving colorforms around a stage.

-Which are the dreams that you prefer not to illustrate? Not every dream CAN be illustrated (at least from my experience) Often, I will start by roughing out 25 dreams, only to find that 5 or 6 actually end up as completed illustrations. Most of the problems result from “dream logic”.  Additional illustration might be required to show back story about a given object or person, which in itself would require a volume of dream illustrations. In reality, I would prefer to illustrate all my dreams.

-You have published 2 volumes of dreams. What have these books brought to your life? Some nice words and a few sales.

-In some dreams you mention Mexico. Is there any reason that explains your dreaming with Mexico? I’ve never flown the space shuttle or been to Mexico. That doesn’t stop me from dreaming about it.

-Do you remember a dream that your father or your mother told you? As a child, we did share our dreams occasionally. Nothing specific comes to mind at the moment.

© ALL THE IMAGES BY BRIAN GUBICZA.

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Questions by Roger Omar. June 2010.

LA CELEBRACIÓN: RUI TENREIRO

© RUI TENREIRO (IMAGEN DE SU LIBRO "LA CELEBRACIÓN").

La celebración
La gente celebraba el fin de la temporada agrícola anual y el comienzo de la próxima. A lo largo del camino habían árboles enormes. Parecían champiñones altísimos con la parte superior plana. Eran un poco surreales, como si amontonaras hojas sobre la copa de un tronco. Las copas de los árboles también estaban llenas de florecitas blancas.
Una multitud de gente cantaba y gritaba, bailando y caminando a lo largo del camino. Llevaban palos largos. Eran tan largos que alcanzaban las copas de los árboles, y la gente golpeaba las hojas de los árboles con los palos y hacía que las flores volaran al viento; millones de flores volaban hacia la ciudad. Las flores volaban sobre la ciudad para fertilizarla, y para dar buena suerte a sus habitantes. Después de haber desprendido todas las flores, se quemaban los árboles. Y en la próxima temporada crecerían nuevamente.
(Sueño de Rui Tenreiro)

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RUI TENREIRO // Dibujante // (1979. Maputo, Mozambique).
Actualmente vive en Estocolmo, Suecia.

EN MAYO 2008 SE PUBLICÓ “LA CELEBRACIÓN”, SU PRIMER ÁLBUM DE CÓMIC.
EN ESTA ENTREVISTA RUI HABLA SOBRE EL HERMOSO SUEÑO QUE DIO TÍTULO AL ÁLBUM.

-¿Qué has celebrado últimamente?
La buena vida junto a mi novia. El viernes por la noche bebimos whiskey y bailamos en mi cocina al ritmo de viejos clásicos. El domingo cenamos ensalada de salmón y vino, fuimos a una exposición, fumamos en pipa y leímos juntos.

-Saint-Exupéry aparece en tu álbum “La Celebración”. ¿A qué se debe tal privilegio?
Fue un tributo a dos autores. Hugo Pratt lo incluyó en uno de sus libros. Me intrigó mucho la desaparición de Saint-Exúpery durante la guerra. Su avión se esfumó misteriosamente. En mi historia, Saint-Exúpery está perdido en un lugar desconocido con un avión que funciona mal. Es como si hubiera estado volando de un lugar a otro durante años, extraviado. No como su principito… De algún modo, me parece que estuvo volando todos estos años en la imaginación de la gente, hasta que su avión fue hallado recientemente.

© RUI TENREIRO (PORTADA DE SU LIBRO "LA CELEBRACIÓN").

-¿Ha influido tu talento en el modo como cocina tu madre?
Mi mamá todavía espera que le halague sus recetas favoritas y se niega a hacerme galletas de almendra. No creo que nada haya cambiado.

-El sueño que escribiste y que da título al álbum aparece también dibujado en el cómic. ¿Estaba este sueño destinado a inspirar un álbum o fue sólo una forma de deshacerte de él?
El sueño vino a mí como una historia y permaneció durante meses en mi sketchbook hasta que decidí incluirlo como parte de un cómic que ya había empezado a dibujar. La única cosa real cuando sueño es el sueño. Escribí este sueño al despertar. No es que tuviera necesidad de aprovecharlo de algún modo… fue el sueño el que se abrió paso en mi historia.

-¿Recuerdas otros sueños que te hayan motivado a hacer algo, además de dibujar?
Algunos que probablemente me han provocado celos, frustración, lujuria y otras cosas que aún sentía al despertar y que me hicieron reaccionar. Me gustaría hacer una instalación de un sueño que tuve siendo niño: había un laberinto blanco con un único camino que conducía al centro, donde había un pequeño cuarto cuadrado. En el centro de la habitación había un busto de bronce de Marx.

-¿Eres capaz de interpretar tus propios sueños?
No. No es fácil saber con seguridad qué significan. La única cosa de la que estoy seguro es que los sueños despiertan emociones. Quizá despiertes de un sueño donde alguien que amas te traiciona. En la vida real puedes aún sentirlo y, si le cuentas a esa persona tu sueño (incluso cuando dices que se trata sólo de un sueño) siempre existe la posibilidad de que el sueño provenga de sentimientos que tú tienes y no necesariamente de un absurdo rincón de tu cerebro. Así que cuando dices “es sólo un sueño”, no siempre significa que sea sólo un sueño.

-Mientras escribías la historia del cómic leías folklore japonés. ¿Crees que haya una conexión entre el folklore (de cualquier región) y los sueños (el subconsciente colectivo)?
Claro, una fuerte conexión. Cuando estaba terminando de escribir la historia vi la película “Dreams” de Akira Kurosawa. La película narra 8 sueños de Kurosawa. Cada sueño es una historia corta. Me quedé maravillado por el parecido que su último sueño en la película tiene con mi sueño “La Celebración” y con el cómic. Con una precisión asombrosa adiviné exactamente lo que dirían los personajes. De cualquier modo, tenía casi toda la historia del cómic escrita cuando leí los cuentos de viejo folklore japonés… Antes de leerlos la historia era de corte medieval. Después de leerlos se convirtió en medieval-japonesa.

-En tu cómic hay una imagen inspirada en otro sueño: dos lagartijas comiéndose por la cola… Inventa un significado para incluir esta imagen en un hipotético diccionario de sueños destinado al mercado brasileño.
Has visto el corazón del *Saci Pererê, beberás cachaça con una deidad y renacerás convertido en un ser que proviene de la cola mutilada de una lagartija.

© RUI TENREIRO (IMAGEN DE SU LIBRO "LA CELEBRACIÓN").

-¿Qué desayunaste hoy? ¿Qué llevas puesto?
Té inglés con leche y una tostada con pavo ahumado. Llevo una camisa gris de H&M sobre una camiseta AA, jeans negros, unos zapatos de segunda, una chaqueta de imitación “Members Only” y un paragüas de madera del Museo Nacional de Estocolmo.

-¿Conoces otros artistas que se inspiren en sueños?
Aparte de la increíble compilación de sueños que tienes, sé que Akira Kurosawa y Hergé se inspiraron en sueños para hacer historias.

© RUI TENREIRO (PÁGINA DE SU LIBRO "LA CELEBRACIÓN").

-Como dibujante, ¿cómo te enfrentas a las crisis emocionales?
Recurriendo a mi familia y amigos. Dibujo menos cuando estoy de bajón, y trato de salir de marcha, ver películas, estar con gente, beber café y hacer cosas que me impidan tener que analizar mucho.

-¿Son las personas tan importantes como el escenario?
Las personas son lo más importante. Un lugar aburrido puede ser maravilloso con las personas adecuadas. Si estás en un lugar genial pero no tienes nadie para compartir, ¿qué caso tiene?

-Recomiéndame dos buenos artistas para visitar en Flickr.
Hanna Aaberg: www.flickr.com/photos/kiddet
Martin Ernstsen: www.flickr.com/photos/marshtin

-¿Alguna otra recomendación?
Ninguna en particular. Sólo se tú mismo y recuerda ser humano y pensar que todas las personas podemos fallar a diario, y eso es bueno. Acuérdate también de comer buena comida y beber buen vino con alguien que te guste, y tanto como te lo permita tu cuenta bancaria.

-¿A quién te gustaría tener por compañera en un vuelo de 12 horas?
A mi novia Sara, esperemos que en un próximo viaje a Japón.
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*Saci Pererê es un personaje de la mitología brasileña, un niño negrito de una sola pierna, que fuma una pipa y lleva en la cabeza un gorro rojo que le da poderes mágicos, como desaparecer y aparecer donde quiera. Le encanta hacer pequeñas travesuras como esconder juguetes, liberar a los animales del corral, hacer trenzas en las crines de los caballos… Dice la creencia popular que dentro de todo remolino de viento hay un Saci.
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© ENTREVISTA HECHA POR ROGER OMAR.
© TODAS LAS IMÁGENES DE RUI TENREIRO.
www.theculturefront.com

“The Celebration” de Rui Tenreiro. Editado en el 2008 por Jippi Comics (Noruega) y muy pronto por La Pastéque (Canadá). Páginas: 96 / 104. Tamaño: 21 x 25 cm.

MORE REAL THAN REAL: GORDON HENDERSON

® GORDON HENDERSON// "Summer Swimmers". 1994

It’s the summer and it’s hot, two women have built a fire beside a river and are diving in. This picture was done during my Sparkle Vision period, which was inspired by my friend Jerome Caja. He painted with nail polish enamels. I used layers of gouache. The sparkle doesn’t scan very well.
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