When and where were you born? Are you originally from Austin, TX? What was growing up like for you? Do you have any siblings? When did you first begin to have a fascination with Art?

I was born in 1986 in Southwestern Virginia in a small town near the border of North Carolina. While I was in the womb, my parents were building a house in nearby Roanoke which we moved into after my birth - I grew up in that house and lived there until I was 18 and moved away to Richmond, Virginia to go to college. I moved to Austin after I graduated in 2008. Being a little kid in Roanoke was great - my backyard was wooded with tons of trees to climb and a lively creek to swim in. I have an older brother and we always had a dog to pal around with and there were lots of kids in the neighborhood. I felt safe and my parents must have felt the same - we kids had the run of the whole neighborhood. There weren’t fences anywhere really so we didn’t understand the concept of private property. We were always making forts in the woods and looking for snakes and other critters to terrorize. In the summertime we would play a hide and seek game called Jail Break! with all the kids in the neighborhood - you play at night and two kids have flashlights and hunt down the others - we’d be hiding in neighbor’s trees and shit - it was really fun. Most kids probably aren’t even allowed in their own front yards at night anymore - everyone is so paranoid now. My childhood was very suburban - drinking lemonade and playing sports. Lighting off shitloads of fireworks on July 4th. Going to church on Sunday mornings - we never missed church - I couldn’t stand it and to my memory that’s when my fascination with art really started.

I had this contractor style clipboard case that we called my “drawing thing” that I took to church every Sunday and I just drew pictures while the preachers did their sermons - I don’t think I ever listened to a single sermon. When I got older I became more rebellious - my teenage years were very angsty and I had a pretty hard time without many people to relate to. I quit playing sports and started skateboarding and eventually smoking weed and taking mushrooms and LSD a few times. Skateboarding was the center of my universe - I couldn’t stand teachers, principals and cops or anyone concerned with trying to point my life a different direction than what I wanted - I was just like “FUCK YOU!!!” A pretty common experience, but when you’re that age you think you’re the only one who feels alone and you’re just figuring out how to navigate weird and new emotions. I had cops in my high-school and got into a fair amount of trouble doing what most teenagers have done forever. The principal was a major asshole with a zero tolerance policy toward certain behavior, so I ended up being charged and having to go to court for some minor bullshit and getting treated like a criminal - drug tests, counseling, suspension - it left a permanent chip on my shoulder toward figures of authority. So yeah around then was when all my forms of protest began - skateboarding as protest, art as protest, drugs and alcohol as protest. I was always fighting against something or somebody trying to change who I was becoming.

“Hello Green Man I am A Tangerine” 2019.

What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were among some of the first artists, or in general, creative forces that made a huge impact on you early on? Did you have any other interests outside of art and the other mediums you’ve embarked on?

Well like I said, skateboarding was everything for me from 14 onward, so just a lot of time spent in church parking lots before my friends and I could drive. Once I turned 16, we would drive all over town looking for spots or hanging out at Salem Skatepark in the next town over. When I wasn’t skating, I was either watching skate videos or playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and smoking as much weed as I could without my parents knowing! The first artists that made an impact on me were illustrators and authors like Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak. I loved cartoons and comics - I was always attracted to the irreverent, crude or subversive stuff. I loved MTV’s Liquid Television, Aeon Flux, Beavis and Butthead, Ren and Stimpy and a DC comic called Lobo, who was a hard living intergalactic werewolf bounty hunter. I have always loved music and at that time mostly whatever my older brother liked or what was on MTV, which was a lot of alternative rock. I remember going to the local record store in Roanoke, The Record Exchange, and seeing certain seminal albums and t-shirts that I fell in love with - I remember looking up at all the t shirts hanging on the walls and seeing the Sonic Youth washing machine shirt and being captivated by it for no apparent reason - I had no idea who Sonic Youth was yet - I just loved it cause it was so different than all the commercial shit at the mall. All the Metallica and Megadeth shirts were so cool to me.

I don’t know how old I was, but in the early 90s my Uncle Jay married this woman when I was in elementary school and she had a son, Nathan, who was probably about 10 years older than me. When my family would go visit my grandmother, Nathan would drive my brother and I around in his car and he had a Jane’s Addiction tape, Ritual De Lo Habitual, and when I saw the “Been Caught Stealin” music video, I was completely blown away. 8 year old mind blown to bits watching a dude in drag walking through a grocery stuffing shit into his clothes and just being so enamored and slightly scared of Perry Ferrell - he still gives me the same feeling to this day. I remember going back to The Record Exchange and looking for Jane’s Addiction and seeing the naked ladies on the album covers for the first time and getting the same feeling that Perry gave me, all at once curious and scared and kind of horny I guess? Of course I wasn’t allowed to own them so that started my fascination with erotic art or art that was deemed “explicit”... so after then I was always tearing little corners off the protective covers of dirty magazines at 7-11 and bookstores to get a peek at what was underneath. I was obsessed with anything that I was “too young” to hear or see - I just wanted to be bad in the best way.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an artist? Did you go to school for art? How did you initially become interested in working with the mediums you’ve chosen? Before your career and path as an artist took off, what was that trajectory like? When did everything start to click for you?

I don’t remember ever making a conscious decision to be an artist - there wasn’t another version of me. I never thought of art as a career path until my senior year of high-school when I had to make a decision about what to do next after graduation. My art teacher, Sandi D’Alessandro, had a professor from Virginia Commonwealth University visit our class to recruit students and in 2004 I moved to Richmond, Virginia to study art there. That same professor, Sandra Luckett, ended up being one of my first art teachers in college and she was the best - smoked cigs with the students and treated us like adults, which was something I was in desperate need of after high-school. Drawing was my first love - I had little interest in other mediums so I really wanted to try to be an illustrator and it seemed like the most realistic way to make a living as an artist. When it came time to declare a major, I didn’t get into the illustration department. Painting was my second choice and I wasn’t motivated enough to better my portfolio to give illustration another shot, so I stuck with the painting department.

I had a lot of freedom in there, which I owe to my favorite professor and college mentor, Sally Bowring, who had a very loose teaching style: show up with work and talk about it - she wasn’t much for teaching technique, she just wanted us to make work and I thrived with that freedom. I did some painting and dabbled in three-dimensional work here and there, but I stuck mostly to drawing with graphite. It wasn’t until a few years after I moved to Austin that I started taking painting seriously - I finally had hit a wall with graphite and needed to add some color to my life. Before I started my freelance career, I did all kinds of odd jobs: cooking, valet, more cooking, warehouses, Census Bureau, etc… But I always made time to make art. When I moved to Austin in 2008, I fell into a creative scene pretty quickly. My friend Darren had a big influence on me back then - I spent a lot of time at his house making zines and screen printing shirts - very DIY. There was a bookstore and gallery down the street from Darren’s house on the Eastside run by Russell Etchen called Domy and Russell gave me my first solo art show opportunity and it sold out! That was a huge moment in time for me when I realized I was able to make a little money from art, but mostly that I had an audience and that people connected to the weird shit I was drawing.

In 2011 I ended up opening a gallery and studio space called Common House with Autumn Spadaro, Adam Mendez, Rich Cali and Conner O’Leary - all fantastic artists and great friends. We hosted monthly openings from artists all over the place, but mostly our friends here in Austin. The community was strong and rent was still cheap enough back then to run a haphazard operation like ours - we made art and partied - both really hard. Although we had absolutely no idea what we were doing and made it up as we went along, I had an invaluable learning experience running a “business” at 25. I feel like I’m forever going through a cycle as an artist where everything “clicks” and then crashes and resets - feeling overwhelmed with work and then freaking out when it dries up. Unfortunately, those seem to be the only two speeds. Around 2015, I began getting a lot more freelance work, beginning with my relationship with Quasi Skateboards, then known as Mother Collective. I was feeling too busy to continue working the day job I had, but scared to take the leap into freelance - ultimately I did and I have companies like Quasi to thank for sticking with me and continuing to use my work and support me to this day.

What/who has made an impact on your life and work the most in terms of inspirations and the topics/subjects you choose to explore and expand on? When was your first commission and who was it for?

I’ve always been drawn to artists, musicians, characters and activists working outside of popular culture, people or subjects uninfluenced by trends or societal pressure - moresoeven people that are directly challenging popular culture and its consumers. I’ve always been a reactionary and skeptical person when it comes to hype. I’m on a journey to quell cultural homogenization and corporate influence even if it’s just in the bubble of my own existence. I like hard working, handmade shit - I like art and music made out of strange visions and compulsions that are hard to understand. I like the challenge of trying to decipher meaning and finding connections in art that is clearly personal and unique to its maker - I find in that process the viewer can often discover a narrative unique to their own experience and that’s brilliant and special. I appreciate all the undeniable talent and greatness throughout art history, but I look outside of the usual texts, museums and institutions for most of my inspiration. This led me to my admiration and passion for collecting folk/outsider/vernacular/brut/naive/whatever you wanna call it, art. Folk art to me is one of the purest forms of self expression, it is work that is usually uninfluenced by any school of art - it’s often created with intention to function in some capacity beyond just decoration and it usually isn’t made with any audience in mind.

On the other spectrum, at times it is made out of intense devotion to a higher power or the maker feels called upon in some way, maybe through visions from a dream, to devote their life to making sacred art - it’s beautiful to me. I travel around the country visiting art environments where people turned their entire properties into works of art devoted to their narrative or mission - they are to me the antithesis of conformity, often smack dab in the middle of cookie cutter suburban neighborhoods in small towns and cities, bringing extraordinary vision to an otherwise ordinary place. It’s so intense to witness someone’s life’s work so out front that it lives at the same time within and outside of the society it’s forced to exist in. As a spectator you get to view it just as the artist intended which is rare, we don’t get to experience that often. You may see a retrospective of someone’s work at a museum, but you’re seeing a collection that has been debated and curated by a number of different people who have their own reasons for why they value the work they’re showing, sometimes just to satisfy an obligation to a donor or collector. I love music. I love discovering music that’s new to me from all over the world and from any time or place. Music is equally as inspirational to me as visual art. I tend to think cinematically often, at times scoring my daily life or hypothetical daydream scenarios to music. Searching for the perfect song for the perfect moment is an endless task to the point where sometimes I find myself longing for the perfect moment for the perfect song instead.

I’ve always wanted to be a musician, but painting is the only artform that I’ve ever had the patience to dedicate enough of myself to, so I like to think of my paintings as songs sometimes - trying to illustrate the feeling I get from listening to music. I don’t remember my first commission but I do remember my first sale - it was my sophomore year of college and I was invited to be in a group art show. I made this really weird, gorked three-dimensional painting on a panel with all these fleshy, pink phallus’ made of plastic tubing sticking out of it and go figure a gay man loved it! His name was Jackson, a wealthy older collector who was really nice and ended up inviting me to his home for a debut party for some painter’s work he collected. My best friend and girlfriend at the time went with me - we were only 19 years old, and we showed up to this historic row house, beautifully decorated of course, and there were two beefy, shirtless gay men walking around with trays of cocktails and cigars for the guests. We got so hammered and had such a blast and I remember towards the end of the night looking over at my girlfriend who was wearing a tube top and she was laughing so hard that her tits had fallen out of it and she didn’t even know it! So I was like, “alright time to go, thanks for the hospitality Mr. Jackson.” Good times.

What is your approach and process when going about creating your work? Who are some of your Inspirations whether that's other artists, people you know, bands, etc.? How has your career impacted your life as you move forward working on projects, developing your style more and more?

My process and approach is pretty loose up until I actually start painting - I can’t predict what will strike or inspire me. Often it’s something as simple as mis-hearing a song lyric that inspires a thoughtform to deconstruct and some visual comes out of it. Traveling and hiking always bring new ideas for paintings. I keep a notebook on me at all times so that I can keep track of my ideas and compositions - all my pieces start with a really rough sketch and once I figure out the main composition, I start working, leaving some room for improvisation because the longer I work on a piece, the more likely it is to change. Visual artists who inspire me are “outsider artists” like Howard Finster and Saint EOM - people who you can’t really differentiate their lives from their art. I love Heironymous Bosch - his work was so bizarre and violent and I trip out on how it’s still bewildering to look at over 500 years later. Ed Templeton has always been a favorite of mine, both his skating and art making - a true weirdo and unique individual who has taken his art so beyond where it began. And just so, so many artists whose names I’ll never know from all the books and exhibits of ancient works - Egyptian, Persian, Indian, Celtic, etc… Musically, I love ALL kinds of stuff, but especially shoegaze from the 80s and 90s and psychedelia from the 60s and 70s - I never get tired of that stuff. I like a lot of obscure, small pressing stuff that’s hard to find - I spend a lot of time searching for music that’s new to me from way back.

“Orange Sunshine and Natural Wine” 2022 August-September

There’s a guy named Phil Pearlman, he had a few bands in the 60s and 70s: The Beat of the Earth, The Electronic Hole, and Relatively Clean Rivers - I love everything he’s ever put out - his approach to making psychedelic music is inspiring to me. I’ve been lucky to find bootlegs of all his records because the originals go for BIG bucks. There’s a group from the Northeast, I think Nova Scotia, called Omon Ra, who are no longer making music and it’s really hard to find on the internet now, but they had a completely original sound from the mid 2000s. I listen to their album, “The Spirit Of Jerry Garcia Playing The Rolling Stones” a lot. Another more contemporary musician whose work I love is Julian Lynch - amazing homemade music by one person - I listen to his records and I just wonder how one person has that much creativity inside them. I like jazz artists like Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane and Joe Henderson to name a few. I’m a Dead Head - play “Wake Of The Flood” at my funeral. I love female vocalists - Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. I love the My Bloody Valentine songs that Bilinda sings on. Brian Jonestown Massacre is another favorite of mine. Too many to list - I just love music - there’s rarely a moment of silence in my life.

What project(s) have you worked on that you’ve enjoyed the most,or has it been the most honor/privilege? Has it been difficult since the pandemic to work on your projects, or your commissions?

I’ve been really lucky to work with clients and companies that make stuff I’m genuinely into - I love skateboarding, music and clothes and that’s mostly what I make art for when it comes to commercial work. I do graphics for Quasi Skateboards and I respect everyone involved in that company from the owners to the riders and everyone in between. I started doing album covers and posters for a band called White Denim a few years ago and they’ve been great friends and clients - I have them to thank for the first opportunity to have my work on an album cover which was huge to me as a record collector. Story MFG, a clothing brand based in England, has been another great client the past few years - they’ve given me a lot of fun work and creative freedom and it’s been inspiring to watch their brand grow and see how they use my designs. They’re mission is to combine sustainability and a high level of craftsmanship which is an ethos I can get behind 100% - there’s way too much cheap, garbage clothing polluting the world. I recently finished a record cover for a new band called Shady Cove, based out of Portland, Oregon and I’m really excited to see that come out later this year.

Basically I feel honored when any band wants me to do their album art because I know how important that is to them and how much work they’ve put into their music and usually the people that want to use my art are cool and their music is interesting enough for me to agree to work with them. When lockdown happened, the bottom dropped out from under me… Every job I had pulled out and all my art shows got canceled or postponed. Spring of 2020 was pretty hard, but luckily I was able to get unemployment checks and since so many others were getting good money from the stimulus and federal aid, I ended up getting some commissions to tide me over until my clients got back on their feet. I had a lot of free time obviously so I just treated my house like an art project and started a lot of fun work there building stuff that I hadn’t had the time or motivation to do before. My girlfriend and I grew a lot closer - we painted my house yellow and made a lot of yummy food and drank boat loads of natural wine and tripped out in the backyard all year - it was really a beautiful time for us as a couple, all the sad bullshit aside. I still went to my studio all the time and made art, too.

Tell me about your most recent show “A Hood Ornament From Oblivion”. What was the general approach and vision that you had for this show? How has your style/approach changed over the years since you’ve first started out on this journey?

I started working on paintings for “A Hood Ornament For Oblivion” in 2019 because it was originally scheduled to open in 2020, but as I said, it got canceled like everything else. It then got postponed a second time as the gallery moved spaces so it’s technically three years of work. The title and overarching theme of the show is meant to be reflective of the feeling of uncertainty in navigating modern existence. The idea that a hood ornament is essentially a useless decoration, but as we are hurtled in the unknown, it becomes the only point of reference we have, developing into a talisman of sorts amidst the chaos. I wanted to continue using some recurring symbolic imagery and metaphors that have become a common vein in the past 3 bodies of work I’ve created as it’s important to me to continue to compile a series of work that is partially autobiographical, but not linear or grounded in any time or place. I wanted to continue to convey a sense of awe and respect for the powers of nature and the delicate connections bridging all creations, but introduce a disruptive character that highlights the state of constant duality we live in and the fissure we are experiencing in the massive daisy chain of human relations with both nature and its inhabitants.

“God’s Ear (Even The Butterflies Are On Fire)” 2022.

So I came up with this character, The Cosmic Trickster, who is, to directly quote my statement from the show, “a rambunctious spirit to which the artist serves as the vessel - throughout this character’s appearances we are reminded of the tricks we play on ourselves, the games we play with others, and the treatment of each passing day as the next round in a belief match. The Trickster provides a comical navigation of the intricacies of modern human existence, the paranoid feeling of impending doom, the concept of spiritual death and the reward of reawakening. It becomes starkly apparent that, when challenging the notion of absurdity through art, reality is the most experienced competitor.” My approach to art making hasn’t changed much - I try to work as hard as I can on every project I agree to attach my name to. I treat every show like it’s the most important one of my career. I love the feeling of developing a theme for new work - I get a tingling feeling in the base of my spine when I feel like I’ve come up with something exciting. I like to feel my eyes dilate when I let my mind wander and harness little islands of ideas floating in the ether. My style is constantly developing - I try to keep it open to new techniques, textures and compositions so I don’t get trapped in one approach. My well of inspiration gets deeper all the time - art making is like religion to me, there’s just too much out there to decide to follow one certain path.

Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?

If you’ve made it to the end of this, I thank you for your time - see you when we get there.

https://www.instagram.com/gill_waynor/

https://willgaynor.bigcartel.com/

Dakota Brown

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