Interview with Student Artist Jessica Hayworth

From: South Shore CA
Age: 22
Major: Fine Arts (2D practices)

Interview by Sean Collins and Rachael Robertson

Q: When did you first discover your artistic talent and decide to become an artist?

A: I grew up on comics and illustrations and was heavily inspired by the fine detail of the line work. I was about 8 years old when I knew that art was something that I seriously wanted to pursue.

Q: Do you remember what your first piece of artwork was?

A: It was an 8 page graphic story that I made about a journey to meet the sun. I remember an adult pointing out that the sun's nose looked funny and I was devastated.

Q: Where do you find inspiration? What artists have influenced your work?

A: I find inspiration everywhere. I am a big fan of graphic novelists, especially the works of Stephen Gammell and Dr. Seuss when I was younger. As I grew older, I became more influenced by the work of artists such as Max Ernst and surrealist work.

Q: Describe the style of your work. Do you utilize a lot of symbolic imagery?

A: Yes, I use a lot of personal symbolic imagery. As far as styles go, I often use cross hatching and small, fine lines. Most of my work is in black and white. My work is often described as being dark. I like using the darker stylistic values in my work to transform an image that is humorous in nature. Basically I don't like to make light of otherwise dark subject matter, but I do want to make dark subject matter more bearable.

Q: What is your favorite medium and why?

A: My favorite medium would have to be pen and ink. I like the fine detail and control that I have over the line work.

Q: What role does recognition or awards play, if any, in the creation of your artwork?

A: Awards are not necessarily very important to me, however it is always nice for people to recognize or praise your artwork. Having people notice your work makes you feel like you are doing something right.

Q: What is your favorite critique you have received?

A: My most memorable was from a classmate during a critique in reference to my mural. She said when she walked by it there was "a twinge in [her] heart." It was the sweetest response that I have ever received.

Q: Any words of advice for aspiring artists?

A: Keep at it. Don't be discouraged by any negative feedback. You learn more from your failures than you do from your successes.

(above: Jessica drawing out the number of days she's been alive, on her studio wall; it actually seemed like a lot fewer days than she figured, once she was done)

For posts that Jessica made when she was student blogger of the month, click here. Her blog is at http://jessicahayworthbfa.blogspot.com/

Pictures at a Junior Portfolio Review: Fall 2011

Here are pics from the Junior Art Portfolio Review this semester, a few weeks ago – it had a really good turnout. A partial list of topics broached would include...


The desire to control the subconscious –




The general hypocrisy of the public face that people and institutions turn toward the world –





The mysterious integrity of found objects whose function is unknown or obscure –






What we take, and what we leave behind, when we travel –







The texture of ectoplasm –






Self-consciousness in the human animal –





The evolution of prosthetics –





And the physicalization of bliss in dance and ceramics.

More on Hockney's Pawings

A couple days after making a post about getting my sea legs with iPhone's Brushes app, a really good article about David Hockney's iPhone paintings showed up in my mailbox, via the New York Review of Books. The article is also online, and I highly recommend giving it a read (although there is one piece of genuine misinformation in it: namely, that you can't use a stylus with the app. It's interesting info that Hockney exclusively uses his thumb to paint on the iPhone, but the pogo stylus works just fine).


One amusing detail from the article is the author's equivocal language when it comes to describing the act of digital painting:

...Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint (it's not yet entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device's screen...

At first glance, I thought this was a ridiculous hangup, but in thinking it over, "Brushes" really does blur the distinction between drawing and painting. Maybe it'd make sense to hybridize the words: "dainting" or "pawing," the latter being especially suitable for those who use their thumbs.

At any rate, the author of the article, Lawrence Weschler, displays a nice sensitivity to the technical aspects of working with the iPhone -- the way the black screen can function as a looking glass, and the appeal of the screen's self-illumination. The self-illumination makes the screen a natural for sketching in the dark, opening up possibilities for sketching at dawn or dusk (or in the dead of night). The flip side, however, is that full sunlight (which is a boon to paper or canvas) presents problems of reflection on the glass. I actually tried to make a picture of the beach at Sand Harbor one day, and found it fairly impossible to make headway against the glare on the screen.

Hockney, as usual, makes for a lively source of quotes. It's funny that he doesn't like the new version of Brushes, "Brushes 2" -- I haven't yet tried it out myself, but I'm kind of dying to, since it has layers, something I was really aching for in the original version. I don't know if he's just being cantankerous, but you have to love his explanation that he's not actually painting on his phone: "it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad."

I forgot, in my last couple postings on Brushes, to post a link to the Flickr Brushes group, which has a wide variety of art made with the app. There's a lot of attractive work being posted there. Three participating artists whose work I've enjoyed are:

José Carlos Lollo


fhierro (from Madrid)


Fabric Lenny

Ensor's Appalling Parade

Sanford Schwartz had a good article on James Ensor in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, titled "The Mysteries of Ensor." I'd seen a few examples of Ensor's work before -- including a couple of his skeleton pictures, like "Skeletons Warming Themselves" and "Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring" (both reproduced below), which offer riffs on the medieval "Dance of Death" sequences that showed Death leading people from all walks of life into the grave. I'd come to the "Dance of Death" out of an interest in comics -- they're an early Western use of images deployed in sequence; probably the most famous of these sequences was done by Holbein the Younger -- several of those images are linked on this page from a site organized around the theme of Death in Art. Ensor got himself into the death game with his etching "My Portrait in 1960" (he was born in 1860):
But Ensor's work wasn't restricted to turning the "Dance of Death" into morbid comedy. Schwartz describes Ensor's work further:

Ensor is... known, of course, for prying open, as it were, the lid of propriety on the box that holds our most impish and irregular thoughts. His best-known images present a kind of nonstop Mardi Gras, where goblins peer from behind furniture or swarm around us as we sleep, skeletons in top hats and overcoats try to warm themselves near a stove, and Satan's hairy-tailed helpers drop down from above to round up various locals. Jurists, prelates, the Belgian king, military men, and officials of every sort (some of whom we learn are members of the art establishment) turn up as ogres. In the print Doctrinaire Nourishment, these upholders of society's moral values squat on a ledge and defecate (each stream reflecting the relative heft of the man's buttocks) into the open mouths of the horde waiting below.

In other words, Ensor's work is right up my alley, and I'm surprised it's taken me this long to really know something about him. Comical, grosteque, scatalogical, proto-surrealist: what's not to love? Reading the article sent me on a Google Image Search to dig up as many hi-res versions of his work as I could -- I've culled my favorites below. Click on them for larger versions.