We Did An Interview. ⇒
28 January 2014, early evening
JS: It seems that you’re actively participating in two traditional painting genres: female nudes and still lifes. But you mash them together in an interesting way. There will be the female nude as the center of the canvas but she is surrounded by all this stuff.
ZS: I think part of it is that in other art and media, I hardly see anything that looks real. It doesn’t look like life. The people look off. Their apartments look empty. How many times have you seen a movie where the office is empty, nobody has anything taped to their wall? Like in that movie Drive, which is a fun movie, but he goes into this strip club and it’s the cleanest strip club I’ve ever seen. It creates a barrier where things don’t feel real—at least to me. So I seize on details that feel real which make things look like real life. Open a purse and inside it you will find a change purse with a crab on it, keys, gun, and whatever else. Wong Kar-wai and Wes Anderson seem to catch that on some level of detail. Some people say that my pieces are messy. I’m always like, I don’t believe you. If you have kids your house is messy, and if you are a guy you definitely have a messy house. Right now we are at a restaurant and it’s a cluttered place. It’s a nice, clean restaurant but this table is just chaos. There’s a milk container, a peppershaker, a PBR can, empty sugar packs, and silverware everywhere. You never see this in art or media
An interview with the artist Zak Smith—who I sometimes play D&D with.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.