Jeremy Hight: Who are some are your influences?
Moki: Nowadays I'm very much influenced by my friends especially if they work in a similar field. For example with the beetobee collective we had a great exchange: we cooked together, discussed our or other artists' works and exhibited together. I think we were growing together and finding our own visual or poetic language. Besides that I think I'm deeply influenced by my childhood in the countryside. Nature is in many ways a big inspiration for me.
JH: You are very versatile. How do you see your works in different styles and mediums informing each other?
M: Changing the medium or style from time to time gives me freedom and the needed distance to my own works. It keeps me flexible and open for influences. After a period of concentrated painting I need to do something else so I start to work with fabrics or make sound experiments with a friend. Also the change of working alone and working together with a group or a partner is refreshing and inspiring. I'm glad to have these possibilities!
It can happen that a character from a graphic novel appears in another form in a painting, or the background of a painting copies itself and changes into a pattern that I use for something else. Mostly it's the variation itself that makes it easier to concentrate at the same time as it motivates me.
JH: What connections do you see between portraits and landscapes as well as of the body and nature?
M: I come from a small village at the foot of a hill. It was often raining because the clouds had to climb up the hill. Weather makes a much bigger impression if you live in nature. Weather decides so many things, especially if you are a kid that likes to play outside, growing up spending a lot of time in nature, losing yourself in a forest at 12 and walking for hours before you find someone you can ask where you are.
I think my upbringing and my early education which was awakening a kind of awareness and responsibility for nature is what is affecting my imagery. The humans who seem to dissolve in nature are probably escaping from reality and/or society; they seem to choose a hermetic life a kind of symbiosis that makes them one with their environment (a harmonic rapport / a peaceful co-existence?) but it is too complex and intangible to describe in words.
Maybe this story from the chineses philospher Zhuangzi can help:
"Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and
fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He
didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was,
solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi
who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was
Zhuangzi."
JH: What are you working on right now?
M: I just finished the first volume of a children's book. Author Rae Mariz had the idea for Stranger than Imagination. The book series is to show animals with extraordinary features that are often threatened with extinction. Rae is simply brilliant and i'm very happy to be able to work with her. The first book is called "rare fur-covered beasts". It contains a selection of mammals like the long-beaked echidna.
We are recently looking for a publisher in America and Europe. Right now I'm working on a new art book. it will be published by Gingko press who also published How to Disappear, my last art book. Shelter is the name of a series of paintings that I have been working on for the last 4 years. I'm copying wood structures to imitate marquetry. The paintings remind me a bit of Asian woodcuts with their rolling lines.
JH: Do you like to play with identity in your work?
M: Actually, I started to work under a new name. From my own experience it can be difficult to work in different fields or with diverse media, not from the artist point of view but from the observer's direction. With too many occupations you cannot be labeled easily and therefore you can slip through the grid. For example, in art academy I stopped showing my graphic novels because they thought I didn't take art seriously because I was doing comics too. Applying for scholarships is also problematic.
Check out Moki's paintings in this issue of Unlikely Stories: Episode IV!
Jeremy Hight is the Art Director at Unlikely Stories: Episode IV. You can learn more about him at his bio page.
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