Living in Boxes & Speaking Through Bubbles
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Rock n’Regeneration
08
Nature’s Pocket
12
Like Skinned Knees
14
Specter
17
Pretty Obsessed
18
one-on-ones
current events
one-on-ones
moody musings
visuals
one-on-ones
www.smearmagazine.com Table of Contents
David Garrett The Kendalls David Thibodeaux Ignacio Martinez Ellie McHale Emma Johnston Lee Koontz David Miller Charlotte Burnod Rick Cantrell Liz Malett Margaret Young Morgan Acree Alfretta Lee
Kendall Akins Brittany Leslie Jennette Saunders Bananarchy Alysa Joaquin Julie Roth Audrey Browning Michel Brown The Bjornsons Logan Burroughs May Endres Ashley Herr Matthew Brown The Gibsons
Jenna Million Rudy Polacheck Emily Joy Melanie Allen Alejandro Diaz Sandra MuĂąoz Natalie Van Note Genny Brooks Tracy Parlate Josh Magness Alex Grimley
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CONTRIBUTORS 1. Mary Cantrell founder/editor 2. Emily Gibson founder/editor 3. Darby Kendall managing editor 4. Nathan Burgess art director 5. Crystal Garcia art director 6. Cody Bjornson photographer 7. Mason Endres photographer 8. Bryant Ju illustrator 9. John Pesina illustrator 10. Devonya Batiste writer 11. Thea Robinson photographer 12. Dani MuĂąoz illustrator 13. Hunter Funk writer 14. Henry Davis photographer 15. Alejandro Diaz photographer 16. Nat Bradford illustrator 17. Jill Picou illustrator 18. David Garrett chief financial officer
Contributors/03
Interview with Graphic Novelist and Ex-Figure Skater: Tillie Walden Written By Mary K. Cantrell “It’s like, I’ve published three books,” 20-year-old comic artist Tillie Walden affirms. “Am I still a rising star?!” Tillie spends, on average, seven hours a day illustrating. She spent her prom night working on comics; she’s probably drawing as you read this. Her comics have a dream-like quality, pulling you in with their minimal, yet effective design and thoughtful storylines. Tillie uses color sparingly, often opting for pastels or muted hues. Her work is subtle, confident in its understatement, and just damn good. The architectural spaces in her comics show an understanding of texture, depth and space. Her predominantly female cast of characters are equal parts reflective and humorous. In her debut novel, “End of Summer”, Tillie chronicled a family’s long winter inside a huge, magical castle. Her second book, “I Love This Part”, tells the story of two girls as they fall in and out of love. Her newest online comic series, On A Sunbeam, follows its main character, Mia, through her journey in boarding school as a young girl and then as a young woman working to restore old buildings in outer space. The success she has achieved through these works has allowed her to work as an illustrator full time. Her most recent work, “Spinning”, released this fall, is a 400-page 04/One-on-Ones
graphic memoir about her 12 years as a competitive figure skater. “I think a lot of people are a little judgmental of a 20 year old who just finished their memoir because it gives people this idea that I claim to understand everything I’ve been through and that I’m so sure and I’m ready to put it on the page, but I’m really not.” After she quit ice skating two years ago, she felt her residual feelings of distaste were something she wanted to work through. Luckily, those feelings were still visceral as she wrote the book, which she found to be somewhat cathartic. “I did not work out my skating issues on my own. I worked them out by drawing it,” Tillie says. “There were sometimes when I would draw a page a be like ‘I just leveled up, I just dealt with something’ by drawing myself in that situation.”
“There were sometimes when I would draw a page a be like ‘I just leveled up, I just dealt with something’ by drawing myself in that situation.” She woke up at 4 a.m. every morning for six months to work on the novel, ironically the same time she used to wake up for skate practice. With little media out there about ice skaters, she says her book is exploring topics that are rare-
Photos by Cody Bjornson
ly discussed in the skating world.“I think it will be fun for the public to see all the crazy details that go into being an ice skater, like putting band aids on your boobs so the judges won’t see your nipples or taping your ice skates so you don’t trip on any of the lace.” By re-examining her life as an ice skater for the novel, Tillie further critiqued the performance culture she was a part of. She explains ice skating is all about being graceful and composed, not about showing how hard you are working or how fucking freezing you are in a leotard out on the ice. “The book is about kind of a negative experience with the sport, I am very critical of how ice skating treats girls,” Tillie says. “My experience was sort of in this strict feminine
culture and the book is very critical and it involves a lot of bad experiences with people.” She disagreed with a number of regulations, like the rule that female skaters had to show their legs while male skaters were allowed to wear yoga pants. Tillie also questioned the frequency of often all-male judge panels and the necessity for women’s ice skating costumes to be highly sexualized. Tillie felt like she was just dipping her toes into the water with LGBTQ themes in her first two fictional novels. But with Spinning she didn’t want to hold anything back, and openly talks about her experience growing up and being gay. “A thing I examine in the book is what it’s like to be gay and a girl and sort of trappOne-on-Ones/05
ed in this feminine culture where I’m really not feminine but I also was very attracted to a lot of the girls because they were just like always around me so it was this hilarious balance of ‘Oh my God I love being in this locker room’ to ‘oh my God I hate being in this locker room.’” Tillie says she tried to put as much of herself on the page as she could. Everything down to color choice is a representation of how a setting– like being in a bizarre stadium– or situation made her feel. “So much of my skating career was obviously in skating rinks, wandering through strange stadiums, early, cold.” Tillie says. “All of these weird feelings in this kind of weird place that you don’t really recognize that kind of feels purple to me.” In “Spinning”, the color yellow is
08 || Tillie Walden
used as a device to build up tension and meant to have a bigger impact on the reader. “A lot of the book has to deal with a sense of light, spotlight, headlights, hotel lights, all these different senses of light are used throughout the book,” Tillie says.
“A thing I examine in the book is what it’s like to be gay and a girl and sort of trapped in this feminine culture where I’m really not feminine but I also was very attracted to a lot of the girls...”
Panels from Walden’s On A Sunbeam
But tackling the visual side of a comic is only half of the battle; the story still has to carry a compelling written narrative. Tillie accredits a lot of her success to her ability to pace a comic well. “I think it’s harder for people to notice my writing, because my drawing is so striking,” Tillie says. “And it’s not that many words so I think people think there’s not much writing but there is! There’s so much there.” Her ultimate goal is for people to be sucked in by her stories, fiending for what’s next and connecting deeply to her characters. With her online following and fanbase growing at an exponential rate, it appears she’s doing just that. “That’s really what I’m after– when people start to
get really passionate about a story,” Tillie says. “It turns out the way I do that is just with small boxes and drawings of people inside them, living in those little boxes and saying things with speech bubbles that just happens to be the way I portray my stories.”
- Check out Tillie’s Patreon to receive access to new comics by her everyday and search Amazon or local bookstores for her graphic novel: “Spinning”.
One-on-Ones/07
Photography by Mason Endres
The Struggle to Modernize the Austin Music Scene Written By Darby Kendall “It’s no exaggeration to say the heart and soul of Austin music is here tonight.” Nearly every pew in All Saint’s Episcopal Church was occupied. Musicians, venue owners, politicians, and citizens filled the sanctuary on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 15 to watch seven influential Austinites discuss the city’s “crisis in music.” The featured speaker of the night, music historian Ted Gioia, began his talk by recognizing the significance of the high turnout, saying the above quote in his opener. The attitude of the panel was largely optimistic; every member made moving points on how to improve the outlook for Austin musicians, but the night was overshadowed by one major theme – nostalgia. It hung like a cloud over the room. During his keynote, Gioia made several valid, interesting points regarding 08/Current Events
the music industry during the 19th century – but when the address came back to the modern day Austin, it fell flat. By focusing so heavily on lessons to be gathered from the past, Gioia neglected to discuss the future of technology and music, outside of vague terms. In a way, the evening symbolized the current state of Austin’s music scene. As residents and rent prices increase, altering musicians’ relationship with the city, those with good intentions struggle to find a way to look forward. One panelist, John Mills, a professor of jazz composition at The University of Texas, has seen the city grow since he played his first gig here in 1971. He says the increasing population has led to less housing and a hike in rent prices, harming musicians. “The cost of housing is a big problem, but this isn’t the musician’s fault,” Professor Mills says. “Finding reasonable rent is harder than ever in Austin.” While the city struggles to handle
its rapid growth, it has become easy for locals to resent those who have just moved in. The rising population breeds competition between artists, as Freddie “Steady” Krc, president of the Austin Federation of Musicians, knows all too well. “I promise the musician who moved here last year is complaining about the one who moved here last week,” Krc says. Mills says he is also concerned by the possibility of growing competition between longtime residents and newcomers. “When new musicians show up in Austin, we should be welcoming,” he says. “We’re all in this together, we’re gonna make this work. That’s what separates us from cities like New York and Los Angeles.” O n e Austin couple is working to welcome residents, both old and new, into the scene through live music. Will and Noel Bridges, co-owners of the classic blues club, Antone’s, hope to revitalize and modernize the city’s music industry with their night club, which they re-opened at the beginning of this year. “I often remind myself that the value of live music will never go away,” Will says, echoing the points he made as a panelist at the September forum. “Nobody can deny there is value there; it’s kind of spiritual. What has changed is how we monetize it.” And that shift in music mon-
etization is changing at a rapid rate. Due to the rise of free streaming services, the record industry has seen sales drop to historic lows. According to the Record Industry Association of America, CD sales dropped 17 percent from 2014 to 2015, while subscription streaming went up 52 percent. This change in music format has many in the industry scrambling, but the Bridges aren’t worried. Rather than view the record business’ decline as the sign of a crisis, the couple has embraced this chapter in music history as the chance for a fresh start. “We might look back on this part of history and say ‘Wow it was a painful learning curve and it disrupted people’s careers,’ but the internet may actually be looked back upon as the great liberator of artists,” Will says. “It’s kind of like starting over again.” But this point begs the question: how do young, unestablished artists survive in this time of change? To answer that, Will claims that a new shift in the definition of musical success promotes the idea that musicians can still make a living, just on a less glamorous level. “The new threshold of success is basically being able to do what you want when you want, artistically,” he says. “Being able to have a comfortable living, Current Events/09
Photography by Mason Endres
doing what I love, that’s pretty much living the dream. Even having a day job and then being able to spend the rest of your time just focusingon your art, that’s still a good compromise.”
“We’re all in this together, we’re gonna make this work. That’s what separates us from cities like New York and Los Angeles.” Professor Mills also promotes the idea that there’s a monetary middleground for musicians that isn’t often acknowledged – rags and riches aren’t the only options for artists. “There are lots of musicians in this town who live middle class lives from playing music,” Mills says. “I hate to see the misconception that playing music and being broke are one and the same.” 10/Current Events
The struggle for venues and musicians to afford rent prices has even attracted Mayor Steve Alder. His Austin Music & Creative Ecosystem Omnibus Resolution, released in February, maps out a plan to help the local music industry and arts sector. And just last month, the city was awarded a $10 million minibond to purchase and preserve iconic music venues, a move that Adler referred to as “creative solutions for the creative class,” in an op-ed for CultureMap. Professor Mills said he “appreciated the gesture,” but he worries about the Omnibus plan’s success. Will Bridges says he is also unsure of any one plan that offers to completely fix the music scene. “I think everybody’s hoping that there’s some big solution out there, and I don’t think there is one,” he says “I think it’s a lot of little solutions, and everybody just has to divide and conquer.” During his decades living in Austin, Freddie “Steady” Krc has seen many similar plans come and go in government, but he doesn’t worry about them. Rather, he has his own bottom line
Illustrations by Bryant Ju
for successful musicians. “If you want to play music for a living, you’re going to do it,” he says. “I gave myself no Plan B. I stuck it out until I made it a reality, and I did it.” Although the “Crisis in Music” forum only discussed the future in vague terms, the panelists did urge attendees to look to young Austinites to improve the city’s outlook. Will Bridges summed up his optimism for young musicians and the Austin scene overall at the end of his talk. “The future of music is actually not in this room,” Will says. “They’re in garages and basements, and they don’t care what we think about their music, and I’m glad about that.”
Current Events/11
Interview with Feminist Artist: Janis Fowler Written By Devonya Batiste The sun sets swiftly behind the historical rooftops of East Austin, Texas as I drink mango-flavored sparkling water and watch a Siamese cat stretch himself on the floor of Janis Fowler’s at-home studio. A sense of sentience washes over me as Fowler makes herself comfortable upon her bed. Behind me are the tools with which she creates, well worn and neatly organized. Frazzled paint brushes speckled with creativity embrace like exhausted, colorful workers. A rainbow of paint stained foam is stacked neatly beneath gently crushed paint tubs. As I look around the room, I lock eyes with Biggie Smalls and Kanye West – hip-hop legends frozen on canvases as perfectly realistic portraits. Breaking eye contact with her portrait work, I admire a beautifully casted labia. It sits upon another innocuous casting. The intimate details of these labia become highlighted with the softening pinkness Fowler christened onto them. A grey casted labia sensually drips macaw-green and highlighter-orange down an extended plaster. The 33 year-old adjusts the lighting as the sun disappears completely. Deep maroon hair drips to turquoise ends on the shoulders of the South Carolina native, who studied architecture at Clemson University before moving to Texas. Having been in Austin for 8 years, Fowler smiles excitedly and discusses her art. SMEAR: When did you identify with feminism? Janis Fowler: Probably when I was going 12/One-on-Ones
through college. I came from a very sexist place and where I grew up feminism was kind of a bad word. Female architecture students weren’t taken quite as seriously. Saying that ‘You’re a female. By nature you’re not as good as a guy is.’ I started realizing that’s not the case. I do realize that I do have worth and I’m just as confident as the person next to me. S: Yeah, absolutely. What was the inspiration for these labia plasters? Janis Fowler: There is a gentleman [Jamie McCartney] and he was doing The Great Wall of Vagina where he was casting different women’s labia. Women were just in awe because they hadn’t ever seen other women’s labia that were not in a highly sexualized fashion. They just wanted to see what a real woman’s vagina looks like. We have this really intense stigma around it. Not only that it’s there to begin with, but also how does it smell? Is it trimmed? How is it supposed to look? You just feel like you don’t match up to this completely unrealistic standard. I really loved that because I realized I was the same. I’m a straight female and I never encountered other labia. I didn’t know what they look like in reality. S: Versus all of the pictures of [penises] we get thrown at our faces? JF: All over the place, just penises. Everywhere! I realized that it struck a really intense chord with me personally because of the way that I grew up. Because my mother never even talked to me about-
Photography by Thea Robinson
what it was like to be female. I realized it was a really strong feminist thing to do. Celebrate your vagina and your labia. I started casting my own just to see what it was like. It was super fun and it was actually pretty easy. I’ve casted it so much since then. When it’s all cast and perfect, it just really is beautiful! And I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m not ugly down here and there’s nothing wrong with any of it.’
things out there to where people see it and just for a moment say, ‘Let me look at this closer.’ So I took the cast of my vagina and I made a mold of the tree. I got it to where it was the right shape, carved it down on all the sides and painted. I took it and I poxed it into the trees and they’re still there! I always wonder, ya know, if anybody’s noticed. Sometimes I look and see if anybody’s hash tagged #VaginaTree. I haven’t seen anything yet.
S: We’ve discovered that you sometimes take your plasters and put them in trees. When did you start doing that?
S: Would you say it’s empowering bringing two of these natural things together?
JF: There are these trees that I always walk by and they have the holes in them. They’re just in this really, kind of awesome shape. So I was like, maybe I can invaginate the tree. I always like the idea of being and making some sort of art that can pull you back into reality. You know you start to get on autopilot where you don’t even see anything anymore. I want to put little
JF: We’re here in Austin, and Texas women have been through all of these really intense battles with rights to our own bodies. The vulva and the vagina are still bad words here in Texas. I wanna normalize it. I wanna put my vagina all over the place. I want everyone in Austin to have seen my vulva at some point and maybe not even knowing. I just think that’d be fun. One-on-Ones/13
“My heart knows its betrayals/ my womb remembers invasions / my tongue holds many stories. / I will remember. / I will always remember.” – Evelyn Ayers-Marsh Written By Anonymous Do you remember the last time you skinned your knees? It always struck me as something so childish and freeing; a bloody knee was a tangible token of a long, good day spent running up and down the rocky roads that curved around the hills of my neighborhood. I wore bright pink Band-Aids like medals to school. The last time I skinned my knees I was 15 and thankful I could hide the scrapes behind the thick denim of my jeans, even though the fabric scraped them and, sometimes, they’d bleed again. I can still see the light discoloration on my kneecaps where my skin split apart – these scars are not a tangible token of a long, good day; they are reminders of a long, dark night that I thought wouldn’t end. These scars, these small patches of discoloration that I can only find on my own body when I seek them out, are the only visible blemishes from that February night. I burned the rest of the evidence – the bloody, ripped stockings that hung in shards on my thighs, the thick green coat that I used to wear everywhere, the black 14/Moody Musings
dress I had just gotten from Forever 21 – I burned everything except my own skin. The rest of the scars are invisible. Unlike a banged-up knee, they don’t heal with some hydrogen peroxide and a bright pink Band-Aid. It took me days to realize what happened and even longer to write it down; after a few agonizing weeks, I looked in the mirror at my reflection, small and average in every way, and whispered: I was raped.
These scars, these small patches of discoloration that I can only find on my own body when I seek them out, are the only visible blemishes from that February night. People always want the gory details of these stories – they want to know about how it felt to be shoved into the back seat of the car, how it felt to realize I had been lied to, how it felt to realize what was going to happen to me. The answer: it was fast. Fast in action but so slow in my memory, somehow. I remember leaving the party alone to mope in the backyard; I remember being relieved to see a
Illustration by Dani Muñoz
familiar face, and being scared when he told methe cops were coming to bust the night. I don’t remember seeing any cop lights, or anyone else leaving, because they weren’t. I remember the relieving feeling of the glass window on my throbbing forehead as we drove. I didn’t question how long it was taking to get home until he pulled into a parking lot I didn’t recognize – a Methodist church, where I stared up at the sign, glinting strangely in the moonlight, and prayed for Hell to be real. I remember the pain. I remember reaching for the door handle and not being able to reach it. I remember finally – finally – getting free from the car and immediately falling, slammed knees on pavement. I remember running as he screamed after me, sprinting in a forest I
didn’t know and couldn’t navigate. Those are the gory details. But that’s not really what happened. That’s what he did; what I did started later, when I climbed the wooden stairs to my house. I greeted my sister and took a shower. I stole my mom’s foundation and learned quick how to cover bruises. I did things stoically and robotically, some sort of fucked up survival instinct. I didn’t know anything, I didn’t even know what had happened. I knew I had a secret now. I knew I was different, but I didn’t know how. I felt like I would never be anyone other than who he made me – the girl with bloody knees from falling down as she ran; the girl who got in the car; the girl who lost. I made a pact with myself Moody Musings/15
that I would carry my assault with me insecret, and carry on. I told my friends he drove me home from the party, like he promised he would, and I sank into bed that night feeling as light as 15-year-old girls should. I spent my late-nights wading through hundreds of pages of research – I had no base knowledge for sex or intimacy, all I knew was what he taught me it was. I looked up sex; I looked up love; I read survivor stories. I tried to quantify and make sense of my experience. I rejected the idea that sometimes fucked up things happen and there’s no logic behind it and was frustrated when a million Google searches didn’t lead me to a grand resolve.
My assault isn’t a deep, shameful secret; it wasn’t my fault. But the thing about scars is, they don’t disappear, not even the internal ones. The harder I looked for an explanation, for a clearly defined answer about what love was and what I was now that he had touched me, the more questions I had. If someone could say they’d drive you home and instead drive you to a place you didn’t know to violate you, how could I trust anyone? How could anyone want me now that I was stolen away? How could I ever want sex, if all I knew was that it hurt? Would I ever feel whole again? I resolved myself to become a background character in my own narrative. I shied away from my friends, taunted both by the weight of my confusion and shame, and the feeling that I was so very different from them now. I felt 16/Moody Musings
uncomfortable around my family, who I didn’t tell and who I constantly worried would somehow find out. In many ways, I had a funeral for the girl I thought I would be. It was like I split in two – the straight-A girl, the funny girl, the emotionally open and radically honest girl with a bright future ahead of her stayed in that parking lot, and I was the ghost left trying to pick up her pieces. I spent a year trying to become who I was before, to navigate my psyche back to a child who still thought the world was kind. I wore my body like it was a mistake I was going to apologize for forever. I had to realize that it was okay – that accepting what happened, accepting it as part of me and moving on, wasn’t admitting defeat. My assault isn’t a deep, shameful secret; it wasn’t my fault. But the thing about scars is, they don’t disappear, not even the internal ones. I still carry my secret with me; I flinch when people touch me; I’m strange about dating, stranger about sex; sometimes I feel like a stranger in this world. Sometimes I look back on that 15-year-old girl – my other self – and wonder what she would be like now. Sometimes I imagine her gentle naivety and her grace, and how she trusts and loves the world. But I am here; there’s no alternative route or fantasy world to find comfort in. There’s no beautiful conclusion. There’s only the truth, my truth, and my grand resolve to take charge of my story again. I wear my survival like a medal to school.
Specter: Mixed Media by John Pesina and Alejandro Diaz “The idea for Specter began when my friend Alex showed me some photos he’d taken that had these weird abnormalities on them; stray burn marks and white spots in the middle of the image that, to me, seemed like portals. I’ve always had this little predilection for paranormal stuff, like alternately dimensions and Cronenbergian nightmares beyond mortal comprehension and all that. But I also like benign, cute imagery that’s all round shapes and cartoony lines. I figured the best way to include both was to make these dudes seem like passersby, more curious than harmful.” - John Pesina Visuals/17
Pretty Obsession: Interview with Street Artist, G52Cube Written By Hunter Funk When I first meet Severiano Garza at Dirty Martin’s on Guadalupe, he’s making the final adjustments on an enormous mural of a Texas Longhorn running the length of the fence outside the historic burger joint. A brisk earlyautumn wind continually threatens to blow away the paper stencils he uses for the mural’s lettering, and it’s not long before Garza’s hands are completely covered in black spray paint. Nonetheless, his demeanor remains cheerful, despite the amount of effort he’s already had to pour into the project. “I might just give you a can of paint and let you finish,” he jokes. “You have no idea how long I’ve spent working on this thing.” Indeed, it’s incredibly painstaking work. The mural measures 35-by-8 feet, and is composed of five layers of 44 laser-cut stencils each. Even with the help of a group of assistants, transferring these stencils onto the fence took several days. But it will now stand as perhaps the most recognizable piece by one of Austin’s brightest up-and-coming street artists. 18/One-on-Ones
As a finishing touch, he adds two quick stencils of his logo and Instagram handle, G52cube, before stepping back to survey his achievement. “This one looks good,” he says, pointing at the second stencil. “That one could be better.” It’s his relentless drive to improve upon past success that’s helped him gain quite the following over the last few years – he has 5,000+ followers on Instagram, live art demonstrations at South By Southwest and a TEDTalk under his belt, to name a few of his accomplishments. Garza shows immense talent for someone who didn’t even fully delve into the art realm until the age of 22, as a disillusioned senior at Chapman University in California. Having gone to college with the intent to play baseball, he hit a roadblock when a knee-injury ended his career. “I was so bored when I got injured and couldn’t play sports anymore. I had this giant void in my life where I had all this time, so I literally watched YouTube tutorials on everything: from how to do pyrotechnics, playing harmonica, to eventually Photoshop and stencil art.” He began with basic one- or two-layer sten-
Photography by Henry Davis
cils from the Internet, but soon wanted to use his own original imagery. “So I learned how to do photography, and from that I learned how to adapt the photos I took into stencils, and then just started challenging myself to become more and more detail-oriented.” “I decided to adopt an art minor because I hated my business degree and needed some kind of fun outlet,” Garza explains, although it hasn’t all been fun and games: “My parents completely cut me off when I failed a course, which I thought was the best thing they’d ever done, because it made me get my ass into gear.” He lived on the floor of a friend’s dorm room for a summer, driving almost 100 miles to his job as an aerospace company’s photographer three days a week, while taking 18 credit-hours in a course he created himself. For his final, he created a series of 36 stencil paintings on wood of model Elle DeBell, titled “Ladies of the Wood.” Six months later, he returned to his hometown of Austin, ready to concentrate fully on his craft. “I knew that if
I was gonna do this full-time, I needed to get really good at one thing and focus on that and just kill it in order to make it.” These days, it would appear that he has. Garza now produces anywhere from 180 to 200 individual stencils a year for commissions, ranging from small pet portraits to a collage series for an extended family of thirty. He’s graduated from hand-cut stencils to more intricate lasercut ones, and his newly-acquired South Austin home is full of impressive works in various stages of completion. He has frequently taken his work on the road, painting in over 50 cities in five countries. Next month he’ll be honeymooning with his soon-to-be wife. But to reach that level of self-sustenance, he tells me, takes time: “You don’t sell pieces on a regular basis; it comes and goes in waves…. Until you get enough clients to where you’re saying no a lot, it’s really difficult to do. Essentially you have to work your ass off and be painting and creating nonstop. And when other people are sleeping, youcan be working.” One-on-Ones/19
Photography by Severiano Garza
Just how much work goes into a given piece from start to finish? Garza gestures to a detailed painting of a campdining hall in his home studio as an ex ample: “Ten seconds to take the picture; ten minutes to edit it… I had to illustrate it on Illustrator – that probably took 60 to 70 hours layering it, there’s five layers; and on this one I used a laser cutter, that was like ten hours of laser cutting; and then painting it took two hours. But,” he adds, “I was able to make five copies of it.” Some of the more popular pieces can receive anywhere from two to ten editions before he retires a stencil. And the most difficult? “Pets, oh my god,” he sighs. “As a stencil artist, fur and hair is tough. It’s not like you have to cut out each strand of hair only once. You have to do it five times, every layer. I’m not gonna cut corners or take shortcuts on a piece unless I absolutely have to, but imagine sitting at a table for twenty hours cutting out bits of dog fur. You’d want to kill yourself.” Garza’s works can be quite large – a mural of a mariachi player in Venice 20/One-on-Ones
Beach, CA, measures 14-by-18 feet – and, in his words, “just stupidly detailed.” But it’s his smaller pieces, namely a series of tiles with human eyes, that strike me the most. “The eyes are almost always people that I’ve met that I like,” he tells me. “It started as a series called ‘People Over Paint,’ which was a discussion of local homelessness. When I moved back from college, I was spending more time downtown, and I started looking at all these guys who were constantly asking for money, who I was talking to a lot…. There’s so much more interesting stuff in the narrative of their life than I’d talk about by painting a normal guy. It’s a really sad existence, too. I’m very passionate about hearing stories that aren’t necessarily happy, because I feel like we’re so obsessed with being happy all the time, there’s no reason why we can’t discuss things that are sad or hard. I think they’re more interesting that way.” His goal for every piece he creates, says Garza, is to spark people’s curiosity and critical thinking. However, casual passersby have a tendency to overlook the humans behind the art. “I started painting little pieces of them – like their eyes – in areas where they would hang out, and people would be like, ‘Oh, cool street art!’ and completely lose the point that I’d painted the guy so they would see him. I had to start putting little bios, like, ‘That’s him. He hangs out right there. It’s not just street art for you to take pictures of, it’s a person and a story that I want you to know about.’ And so I thought it was very ironic, which is why I called it ‘People Over Paint’ – I wanted them to focus on the individual.” “I get fascinated by little things,” says Garza. “I’ll be walking around and see something interesting or cool, and it’ll turn into a little mini-series.” Once, he says, “I thought it would be cool to hang these insects all over the city and make it look like we were infested by bugs, so I did a giant spider, a locust and a beetle,
and put stickers all over the city for a two-month stretch…. Right now I’m doing a series on local Texas fish that I catch andphotograph, and I am so focused and crazy about it. I am obsessed with painting these fish. I don’t know, it’s almost sickening. I think about it all the time.” Besides his stencils, Garza is also skilled at photography, though he admits it tends to play second fiddle to his main pursuit due to the relative lack of creative control. “The art doesn’t end with a literal photograph that looks exactly how you made it when you pushed the button on the camera, captured the data, put it into a sensor, and edited it. It’s so final. I’d rather be able to take that one step further where I can have a little more personality or a little more sense of flavor when I paint it.” Eventually, he might do a show displaying his photos, but is “pretty obsessed” with stenciling for now.
“My goal is to get to where I can freehand everything. But I’m like six years into my art career, from a beginner standpoint. I literally started as if I were in elementary school...” And the artistic climate for stenciling in Austin is good, since, according to Garza, the city’s future looks bright as far as street art is concerned. Recent years have seen the community blossom like never before, largely thanks to the HOPE Outdoor Gallery off Baylor Street downtown, also known as “Castle Hill.” The wall has spurred countless aspiring street artists to paint in a co-operative space of their own. “There are a couple variables in the equation of why I’ve been able to do
art full-time, and one of the starting ones was I did a lot of painting at the HOPE Wall, and that got me a lot of followers on Instagram, and then those followers became clients,” he explains. For those who regularly paint on the wall, Garza says, “you will get over a million people to see your artwork, guaranteed.” “Of course you have to go back and fix it up, or paint something new because people draw dicks all over it,” he adds. “It’s worth it if you can find an economical, time-efficient way to make quality pieces and put your name on it, and I did that for about two years.” The future of the wall, however, remains uncertain, as the sale of the property means it will soon be gone completely. The community is now looking into a new space on the East Side. “If we could do a new one that’s like a public park, where there are artist studios and artist living spaces that are affordable, where they can teach and have a residency, I think that completely transforms all of Austin into becoming a place that’s known for having great contemporary artists.” Not just in the “high art” definition of the term either, he argues; simply “everyday people who love something so much that they wanna paint about it.” As for Garza himself, what’s the next move? “My goal is to get to where I can freehand everything. But I’m like six years into my art career, from a beginner standpoint. I literally started as if I were in elementary school, learning how to draw in 2010, so I really haven’t had time to teach myself that yet.” This rising artist’s career is a cycle of continual growth and renewal, and he never plans on resting on his laurels – “I don’t want to get to the point where I’m not getting better.” From here, it appears there’s nowhere to go but up.
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Art by Natalie Bradford