Bwana spoons3/31/2023 ![]() Tropez, Slint, Pretenders, The Clash, Spoon, AC Newman. I love Prefuse 73, Juana Molina, Brazilian Girls, Blackalicious, Dudley Perkins, St. What styles of music are you into? Does music play a role in your artistic process? When Charles Burns did the Levi’s ads that was rad, too. I love that Gary does all the Cranium art, and that Dangle has his work on. But if I like the product then it’s fine. You definitely won’t see my interpretation of the new H4 crawling over the earth, or one of my characters smoking a Camel Light. Now I do some for Hessenmob, and maybe a board for Krooked soon.ĭo you have any moral qualms with using your art to advertise a product? Those graphics really sucked ass, but I loved that I got to do them. I used to do boards for Dogtown back in the early ’90s. Neil Blender and Mark Gonzales are definitely early influences, and I flipped out when I got to be in an art show with Blender and met him some years back. I grew up with skaters, and skate art was a lot of my early influence. All the cement parks here in Oregon are so effin’ nice. I still skate about once a month, when I feel the inspiration and have the time both at the same moment. There is such an eye for craft, and everything looks so good.ĭo you skateboard? Do you feel any connection to skate culture? Now everybody is using Gocco, silkscreening, letterpressing, and hand-binding. You can’t just crap out a 60-page Xerox that you made in an hour and expect folks to dig it. If anything, it has pushed people that do print to make their shit better. I think there is a gap between indie magazines like XLR8R and the little mini-comic, but other than that, the print culture is effin’ great. I laugh when people say that print is dead. I made lots of great friends pre-internet through trading zines and writing letters. How do you feel about the internet’s takeover of zine culture as the majority of zines move to the online format? Now if I lived in a banyan tree and rowed my canoe over to the mainland everyday to get a banana shake– that would be auto-bio. My art is more a fantasy of the world I want to live in, rather than any type of direct take on what my life is now. The second is putting down blobs and shapes in paint, and then I see what is coming to the surface, just pulling doo-doo out of my ass through layers until I get something that I really like.ĭo you feel that your art is autobiographical? The first is a roughly penciled piece that I usually work out through a thumbnail and then map out. I do both because I have two ways in which I paint. My works always come from inside my guts, so there is always something floating below the surface. Dripping screws and giant horses.ĭo you paint to convey a theme or direct message, or is it driven more by improvisation and intuition? It seemed that everybody was making art or playing music, and everywhere I looked there was rad shit on the walls. ![]() I would skate and hang out with broham Chris Johanson. My friend Jimbo and I would make Super 8 films and draw goofy characters. I met loads of rad artists at that time who were also getting their footing. What artists inspired you as you found your own style?Īfter I graduated high school, I moved to San Francisco in ’89. These days, all I do is draw and paint, and sometimes sculpt or make comics and zines. I started getting asked to be in shows, and so I learned how to paint. I think making Ain’t Nothin’ Like Fuckin’ Moonshine made me lots of art friends. XLR8R: How did you first get into the work you do now? All this from a man who vows he “didn’t go to no fancy art school.” When he’s not boasting about his Lego collection (which exceeds 200 lbs) or his love for tapirs, Spoons embraces modern zine culture and moody metal. Avidly involved with zine-making, painting, and more recently, toy-making, he still finds time to hang out with his wife of 13 years, Marny, and their daughter, nine-month-old Hazel Millie Spoons. ![]() Today, the Portland-based artist is immersed in many different projects. This quickly led to illustration work for the likes of Nike 6.0, Hewlett-Packard, Nickelodeon, Top Shelf, Dogtown, Hessenmob, Buster Design, and Vans. Finding art-making a good way to meet people, he first got into zine culture in 1992 and went on to publish notable rags like Ain’t Nothin’ Like Fuckin’ Moonshine and Pencil Fight. Spending most of his time alone, he found solace in zany Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Underdog and Wacky Races and in the pages of MAD Magazine. A few years later, he failed the first grade and his family moved back to California. Born in LA, Bwana Spoons moved to Michigan when he was three. No matter what medium, the playful surrealism of Spoons’ work is marked by sincere abandon and a love of exploration. Like some bizarre, forest-dwelling cartoon character, Bwana Spoons exists in a world of his own.
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