Hello my FreeLovers! Diego (@iamdiegolucero) here! We’re only 3 days into April and it’s already such an exciting month! We’ve had 2 events at the studio this month and have 6 more coming up!
On April 12th, we will be having a drag show run by our fabulous member, Ian Zwick (@glip_gloss_). Come to the Pink Lemonade 2000 and experience “DRAMA, CUNTINESS, GLITTER, and LAUGHTER”. Very exciting if you ask me, RSVP here,
Following up with even more awesomeness, our very own Hasani Cannon (@realhasanicannon) is having an art exhibition titled Faces of Ansi on April 13th. There’ll be awesome visual art, live music from DJ Sand and Family Junket, and even coffee with one-of-a-kind designs by Hasani! It’s definitely going to be a good time. For more info, click here!
Finally, our member Zion (@zion.blu) will be hosting Rat Park on April 27th. It's a variety show featuring the unforgettable Rabbit Foot Puppetry, live music (my very own band, Liquid Lizard), and stand-up comedian Ethan Conley-Keck! Think SNL, but better (and cooler).
Our members will be having two critique nights and a 2nd web design workshop led by Kali Lachner.
The first event of the month was our new artist meetup! So many new, exciting, and mysterious people! The meeting started off with a tour of the studio (where we got to show off the group drawing we’ve been doing).
We then had an info session/Q&A, and after that, we got to the fun part (dreaded by some). Icebreakers! We did a game where we filled out sheets with facts about the other artists for a prize! Later on we had jam sessions break out in both the music room and the main room. It was so much fun meeting the new recruits, 10 out of 10, would do it again!
We would like to extend a warm welcome to our new artists joining this month:
Alaia Murua
Alice Pilsbury
Asia Booth
Audrey Dwyer
David Robles
Jay Wirth
Latia Jackson
Meech Thomas
Roselena Abanco
Ross Loftus
Sadie Racky
Tzoe Rivera
The next day,
we had a workshop led by our good friend and former member Kali (@kali.lachner). Kali lent their web design experience and gave us a very helpful tutorial on building an online artist portfolio! My main takeaways were:
Keep your website simple; try to show only what is most important for your viewer/customer to see.
Keep your website easy to navigate.
Make your website unique to you!
I had the opportunity to interview two of our new artists, Jay and Tzoe! It was awesome to get to know them better; enjoy getting to know them better, too!
Tzoe
Diego: What kind of art do you make?
Tzoe: I’m kind of a painter, my dad was a painter, and my grandma was a painter too, so I caught the bug. I’ve been drawing and painting all my life but I only recently started taking myself more seriously and realizing it’s my passion and what I want to do with my life.
Diego: Sick, how’d you find out about the studio?
Tzoe: Heaven told me that you guys were taking new folks and I applied… and yeah!
Diego: Welcome!
Tzoe: I’m happy to be here.
Diego: What are you most excited to do here?
Tzoe: I’m excited to work in large scale, right now I’m painting in my room. I have a good amount of space, I have this kind of dual-living room setup but I want to get even bigger, this space is perfect to do that.
Diego: How big we talkin’?
Tzoe: I wanna start doing murals, the largest piece I’ve done I think was 40x60, but I wanna work larger. One day I wanna get a house and just paint the entire outside.
Diego: Like one color, or like mural-style?
Tzoe: Mural, all cool.
Diego: Kewwl. What are your inspirations?
Tzoe: Frida Kahlo is my biggest inspiration, I think, I love her, she’s beautiful. And also another weird one, Egon Schiele is a painter, I think from the 1920s, a real weird gorey style, like German impressionism. I really fuck with it these days. He has this painting where it’s an unfinished family portrait, his wife and and unborn kid died of the Spanish Flu then he died 3 days later. It’s pretty sad
Diego: Anything you wanna plug?
Tzoe: My insta is @Emperatritzz, I post paintings and drawings I’m working on. I also tattoo and I want to get into that more too. Mostly handpoked stuff, but honestly I can turn any of my drawings into tattoos. It’s such a nice medium.
Jay
Diego: Yooo! How’d you find out about Studio FreeLove?
Jay: I had multiple people in my classes telling me, “You should join Studio FreeLove it’s a collective I’m involved in.” Finally, I heard my screenprinting professor bring it up, so I checked it out, and I really really liked what I saw, so I applied and got in.
Diego: What house are you from Harry Potter?
Jay: I’m a Gryffindor, more and more Slytherin though. People who don’t know me say I’m a Hufflepuff but my friends say I’m definitely not.
Diego: Cool! What are you planning on doing here?
Jay: I would love to experiment with stuff I’ve never tried before, like music or graffiti, but I’m definitely mostly excited to have the space to do big projects; I have a small apartment, and I moved across the country to get here. Being able to put roots in a place that’s not my house is nice.
Diego: Sick, sick. Who are your inspirations?
Jay: I really like Robert Valley, he does very angular animations. He did stuff for Gorillaz and Tron Uprising. Just really sleek and sharp. Love this anime called Panty and Stocking, it’s been a huge inspiration forever. My style is always changing, I have a couple go-tos but it’s more like whatever happens is what it’ll end up looking like. I like stop motion too.
Diego: I loove stop motion. What’s your dream career?
Jay: I’d love to run my own studio; I feel like most adult animation here is like, “Look, gay-booger-sex-cum, haha.” There’s a place for it, but c’mon, guys, it can’t be everything. Starting out, I’d probably work doing children’s animation; I would still love to do that, too; it’s how I got into animation; I wanna do kids' animated stuff that treats kids like people and not like little idiots morons who need to watch something to shut up.
Diego: Like Gravity Falls! I love that show. Anything you wanna plug?
Jay: My artist insta is @towu.u. I’m gonna be doing some animation and storyboarding this quarter; I wanna do inter-media painting and shorts based on the screenprints I did.
I had the first person buy my print last month, it felt good. It’s really cool seeing other people find value in my work.
Tzoe and Jay are very cool! Another cool person is Jamie (@insta/ artist page), who just asked me to score her stop motion film with a working title of Nosedive! So here you go, a one-on-one all-exclusive interview with the director!
Jamie
Diego: So what is this project? When can we expect it to be released?
Jamie: I’m working on this animation, I basically started it 10 weeks ago and I have 10 more weeks to finish it. Basically, it’s a stop motion entirely made from collage, I’m going through all these different collage worlds, they start out fun and whimsical but then get scarier and darker and weirder.
Diego: Coooool, where’d you get the idea?
Jamie: I got the idea from FKA Twig’s music video for “Cellophane,” and then I was researching stop motion collage stuff, but I didn’t really see anyone doing what I was thinking of doing, which was why I was drawn to it. This project is really fitting because it incorporates everything I've learned in college. It’s a film, and I started out as a filmmaker telling stories, then I transitioned to photography, which was telling stories in a different way through photos. I’ve been kind of transitioning into collage, I started out with digital collage, but now I’m doing analogue, and I’m incorporating everything I’ve done into one project.
I am personally very excited to see this short film when it comes out; make sure to check out Jamie on Instagram @Jamie_Lauderbaugh!
That’s all from me, toodloo motherfathers; I’ll see you soon!
-Diego Lucero
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