This month’s GARAGE Magazine is all about transformation. The tenth-ever issue features 360-degree fashion editorials, 3D museum tours, supermodels dressed up as Marvel’s most iconic superheroines, and even a special GARAGE Mag app. The Creators Project was lucky enough to snag an excerpt from the mag, part of a conversation with artist Jamian Juliano-Villani. Peep the interview below, and head over to GARAGE Magazine’s website for more.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, and now based in Brooklyn, New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani—night owl and smoker—reaches out for inspiration to comic books, cartoons, memes, illustrated books, and popular animated characters. Her studio consists of a vast collection of books and images that she began collecting while in high school, and from which she regularly borrows in her works. The aim?
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To find a more “popular way of communicating,” and deconstructing the sacral character of traditional pictorial language. “I feel a lot better about making the paintings I do by using other references, so it’s not insolent, and not so personal,” she says.
Having had previous solo shows at Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin, the MOCAD in Detroit, and JTT in New York, Juliano-Villani is currently appearing in Flatlands, running until April 17, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work was also featured at the Unrealism exhibition, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, at the Moore Building in Miami last December.
GARAGE Magazine: I get messages from you at all hours. You texted that you painted 14 hours yesterday.
Jamian Juliano-Villani: That’s the problem with me. It’s not even because of a deadline or some other reason.
When I’m painting, I’m painting all day and my day is really long. So I’ll be at the studio for almost 30 hours straight and then I’ll go home and crash.
Jamian Juliano-Villani, Apparition of Master, 2015 acrylic on canvas. 30×40 inches. Courtesy of the artist and JTT
I like working regular hours, like union hours. Plus, I need sleep.
It’s fucked. It’s not sustainable, it’s not healthy, but it’s how I enjoy working, because, you know, you fuck around and, for three or four hours, nothing happens, and then you get to the important hour, and then I make something good.
The first couple of hours can be really tough, like, “What the heck, I’m horrible at this,” because painting is hard. And then, in the end, it’s, “That looks great. That works.”
It’s funny, because usually the first stupid idea I have turns out to be the one. If I don’t jump on it, I have 30 other ideas, and then I’m just looking at the computer for hours and I don’t do any of it.
I’m really glad you brought that up. So many hours working and not making any of it. I’ve scrapped Photoshop for drawing. Pencil and paper are great and I like doing something that’s real from the beginning. How do you sketch ideas?
I have four computers, with thousands of images on all of them. The images come from everywhere – weird Finnish advertising, catalogues of everything from the 1920s to 1972, something from National Geographic, or whatever. I do a lot of internet searching. I go to the Strand bookstore once or twice a week—the dollar section is the shit. Also images I’ve taken on my cell phone. And I make lists of ideas coming from powerful thoughts, dreams, or nightmares.
I try to mediate those images and lists of ideas, and respond really naturally. I start painting with the background and try to get it done as quickly as possible. Then I begin to layer the shitstorm of images I have in my head. I don’t usually do any sketches or any planning for this—that’s why they look sculptural.
Jamian Juliano-Villani, Better times, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 48×40 inches. Courtesy of the artist and JTT
Your paintings do look sculptural. I did a MoMA conversation some years back with the painter Dana Schutz where we talked about mistakes. As I work, I like to see a painting develop in layers, over time. If I care about an idea, I will fight for it endlessly. Historically, that’s how painting was done—you started and you figured it out, you add a little more left and a little more right, and then you overpaint and start again. A lot of painting happens through thinking and feeling. And often mistakes are how I know where I’m going. That’s what defines a mistake—that you know it’s wrong because you have some sense of what is right.
And just fucking up.
I like mistakes. They are an exciting and horrible part of life. It’s like, okay, we are really doing this.
Painting today is so prescriptive. It’s boring.
I agree.
I didn’t get an MFA.
Me neither.
For some people it’s good, but it would have fucking destroyed me. I like working in a really emotive way. Whatever I make I fucking jump on. Art is supposed to be emotive.
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