Violaine Briat - #inktober

It’s been #inktober all month! Get thee to Twitter and check out the greatness, or make some yourself. Featured below are some #inktober efforts by Violaine Briat’s, along a shot and sweet interview.

You can buy originals of each of these drawings (if you're quick about it), along with other works by her at her online shop.

October 12

msry: How long does it take you to finish a drawing? 

Briat: It takes from as little as 1 hour up to as long as 4 hours? It all depends how clear an idea I have and if I’m distracted or not

msry. What's inspiring the style and content of these illustrations?

Briat: Style wise, I just really enjoy deep black and white, like Jeff Smith’s Bone and Mignola's Hellboy . I was a life drawing teacher too, hence the semi "realistic" body shape. I recently got into tarot and symbolism. I try to dig into that for inspiration

October 16

October 17

msry: I read that you work in Japan as a storyboard illustrator for animated series. How long have you been doing that, and what were you doing prior? 

Briat: I was living in Japan but worked freelance for French and American productions. I started working in the animation industry at 21, and have done boards and character designs since. I write and draw comics in my free time.

October 18

msry: What are you going to be for Halloween?

Briat: I m gonna go to a party with my animation friends (woo LA!) 

What's Violaine going to be for Halloween? Drunk, that's what. If you're into it be sure to tumblr stalk her.

Ancestor by Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward

Here’s a drink you can make to best enjoy Ancestor, which was released today in trade paperback by Image Comics. Take one Philip K. Dick and one Alejandro Jodorowsky (circa The Holy Mountain) and throw them in a cocktail glass with two blackberries and a splash of agave nectar. Muddle. Add two shots of blanco tequila, two drops of Dimethyltryptamine or Lysergic Acid, and give it a dash of Black Mirror. Mix, shake, and serve. Now take your drink to a dark corner of your room, far from your computer or any wi-fi enabled devices. Read and drink slowly.  Short as it is, Ancestor is a trip for the mind that’s worth your time.

Ancestor is a loaded slice of psychedelic philosophy, written by Matt Sheean and pictorialized by Malachi Ward. Set in a non-specified time in a non-specified corner of the United States, it’s the story of a well-meaning lunatic genius who upgrades a social media platform / body enhancement service into a hybrid, post-human being that changes the course of entire human race. Its narrative swerves are buttressed by knods to the philosophical anxieties that we, as a society of “enhanced” interconnected technologies, are slowly coming to know.

Surrender your autonomy to the service
and make her the perfect cocktail!

The plot’s lunatic genius, Patrick Whiteside, is an outwardly kind, curly haired tech billionaire who's tendency to turn conversations into one-sided motivational pep talks betrays his maniacal desire to control and reform everyone he comes across. Whiteside was a co-developer of “the service.” The service is what personal computing will be like once we're able to inject the internet into our blood streams and tether it directly to our mental and bodily functions. It’s more or less augmented consciousness, an artificially intelligent Siri for your mind, that goes with you everywhere. The service can float social media and web content in your face on levitating yellow jelly screens, instantly identifying friends and strangers and objects. It can also talk you down from a panic attack if you’re going nuts. When talking doesn’t work, the service can, at your behest, administer a calculated dose of whatever medication you need to to get on the wagon again, then monitor your vital signs until you’re copacetic. On good nights, it can take control of your body (after you grant it permission to access your motor skills), which it can then use to make a perfectly mixed cocktail of your choice for whatever platinum blonde art femme you're hitting on. The service is the ultimate integrated web experience.

Whiteside talks it out

Like us and our hyper-connected devices, people in the world of Ancestor can become so inured to the service that they experience varying degrees of anxiety when disconnected from it. While the service enables superhuman abilities, it's also a nuisance to immediate experience. Whether you want it or not, the service will tell you everything it thinks you need to know.

Ancestor’s main character, Peter, is not sure how he feels about this intense connectivity. Though he relies on the service to get a grip on his anxiety disorder, he’s often a victim of the incessant suggestions of it’s yellow jelly screens. As troubled as he is by all this, it’s apparent that he is a brilliant and pensive man who is simply trying to life his live free of anxiety, and sees the service as a tool to that end. Peter is invited to an impromptu party hosted by Whiteside in his billionaire mansion in the middle of nowhere. There, he’s made to participate in the beta-testing of Whiteside’s magnificent new invention, his Service 2.0. Peter, Whiteside, and the rest of the world are then forcefully thrust into unknown territory, as Whiteside loses control of his new product. From there on out, things get incredibly strange and wonderful.

Whiteside is like a cross between Goethe's Faust and Ozymandias from Watchmen, placed in the body of a creepy child-therapist or hypnotist. In him we see the expression of a utopian ethos prevalent in Silicon Valley. This ethos, “California Ideology,” preaches that a blend of technological innovation and bold individual action will eventually solve all of humanity's problems. But as the story progresses, Peter grows to resist Whiteside's manipulations and psychological games, and resents the implication that he needs either a guru or a some post-human bio-integrated bloatware to give him peace of mind. By the end of their "relationship," it's Peter, not Whiteside or the human race, who finds something resembling inner peace.

We all know by now the mythology of the tech boom. Scientists and ex-hippies, with the help of massive private and public investment, invented the personal computer, the internet, the iPhone, the Google. The digital backbone of information technology was highly influenced by a bourgeois subset of the 1960’s counter culture. This counter culture failed to liberate human consciousness from its societal captors. Having failed, those with the knowledge and the inclination began to look towards technology and capitalism as humanity’s only hope. A large part of the advertising for contemporary technology and software displays a remnant of that failed hope for technological liberation and omnipotence, the hope that “existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals [or businesses] and their software.”

In response to the Silicon Valley messiahs preaching salvation, peace, and money through tech-gnosis, Ancestor offers an almost satirical counter narrative. It expresses a healthy distrust towards anyone who claims to have all the answers, be they human or otherwise. Malachi Ward and Matt Sheean’s story is an expression of the desire to not be told who you are or what you need to do with your life. It also asks whether or not we should sacrifice genuine unmediated experiences (and the commensurate euphoria and excitement that comes of sometimes not-knowing) for the sake of complete control and self-determination.

If Ancestor has one failing it’s that it’s way too short. While readers will get a conclusion that satisfies the arc, there’s 15 billion years worth of plot missing that I wish they had gotten into. By the end, I found myself wanting to hear more about the how and why of it, to see more of Matt and Malachai’s bizarre alternate reality. It’s such a tease. Maybe the comic book gods will see fit to provide mankind with a spin-off? It’s pretty great for what it is though - a self contained thought experiment with poetic conceits and beautiful art.

I would recommend also checking out this short comic by Ancestor's creators regarding "the process" of making Ancestor a reality.

Henrietta Harris

Portraiture used to be about capturing the essence of a person, but that kind of blew up once everyone figured out that each of us is a messy blob of social conditioning and genetics with shiftable "selves". Now we pay homage to the blobs we perceive.

Life as a social construct is so precarious. And sometimes beautiful. When I get to know someone I read them like literature, as a refractive display of stories and motives and fears. I've always been confused by how people behave and what they want. Tone deaf even, and catastrophically so. Sorry.

A portrait makes the construct palpable, and the human in humanity becomes more apparent somehow. Still can't place it. Like an electron, it's everywhere or nowhere all at once depending on when and how you look. But it gives me time to think and consider, and if the artist is really good a portrait will offer something I haven't seen before. Seeing something I haven't seen before means I think of things I haven't thought of before, that I get a perspective I didn't have before. This is one reason I love "art" in general.

Today's unfocused reverie has been brought to you by sleepiness, Arizona Green Tea, and a portrait of someone I don't know by Henrietta Harris (who I also don't know). She's a painter from Middle Earth. She's great.

The Drowned Girl by Jon Hammer: Prophylactic and investigatory uses of formaldehyde and chocolate milk

The Drowned Girl is a short and obscure graphic story by Jon Hammer, put out in 1990 by the proto-Vertigo DC imprint known as Piranha Press. It’s about Dick Shamus, a private eye hired by no one to do nothing. Dick Shamus drinks cocktails of formaldehyde and and chocolate milk to vaccinate against the AIDS virus. He is one of a lucky few who know that formaldehyde is the AIDS vaccine, invented by the CIA and used by many greats prior to him such as Ronald Reagan. 

Shamus learned this by being a highly effective but unfortunately down on his luck (and seemingly homeless) detective. As he puts it: “Most of the time sleuthing is not the most rewarding work. However, being a drug addict has its charms.” Such charms include being able to spot a secret scheme by a Nazi fifth column hiding in New York’s East Village, an insidious plot by fascists disguised as hipsters and yuppies. Among his other junkie superpowers is his ability to nod off, and in the process morph casual English banter into precious German intel. His investigations lead him all through the Lower East Side’s burgeoning art scene in 1990's.

Visually, the world Shamus inhabits is colorful but tangibly dour, filled with people that are drawn flat, with just enough line and paint for shadow. Jon Hammer’s style is like a 1990’s Edvard Munch. He makes the outlines firm, but everything inside is impressionistic smudge, especially Shamus.  With his teeth clenched in drug infused righteous indignation, Shamus is always the most scrambled, impressionistic figure on the scene, a bright red-orange smear of rage and urgency standing out from the pastel surroundings. 

Shamus’ rage at the young professional migrants can best be understood by understanding the East Village, a neighborhood Shamus calls “in trasition.” The East Village was formerly known as the Lower East Side. While stalking a young art curator to her home so he can interrogate her about the ironic Nazi flag hanging in her gallery (obviously an ironically ironic front for secret Nazi headquarters) Shamus explains it: “The difference between the East Village and the Lower East Side was she probably paid $200,000 for the privilege of owning an apartment in this particular shabby dump.”

Let’s start at the beginning for a sec. In the 1970s and 1980, New York City’s Lower East Side suffered a massive housing crisis that left thousands homeless or precariously housed. Thanks to the flight of middle class families out of the city and into the cozy suburbs, landlords were unable to keep up with the cost of building maintenance and property taxes. This left block after block of nearly empty apartment buildings, as property owners began to figure it was more prudent to bail on their tenants than to keep up with the bills. Then came the inevitable -- local business failed for lack of customers, investors turned a cold shoulder, and the Lower East Side came to be known as a neighborhood you don’t walk around at night. Eventually, this vast dystopian wasteland became property of the city, to be done with as it pleases. 

Enter the soothing balm of choice for urban developers the world over: Gentrification. First, the city began to give rent and mortgage discounts to community groups that would start businesses and do some of the grunt work of rehabbing the territory. Then came the artists. Young and armed with degrees in postmodernism, decadence, and money-having, they populated the area and began to turn it into their dystopian playground, an underdeveloped wonderland full of inspiring crazy people, empathetic poors, and wondrously aesthetic dilapidated buildings and infrastructure. Right behind them came the yuppies: the subset of the professional class whose mentality is halfway between being a teenager and being an adult. Contemporaeously, squatter communities popped up in abandoned buildings, attempting to reclaim space for communal purposes. 

The Drowned Girl is about this tension between the trauma of the fall of the Lower East Side versus what came after: that rush of people from vastly privileged backgrounds that, in the minds of many of the original residents, see the neighborhood as either an investment or a sideshow. To an extent, we know exactly how Shamus feels when he encounters well-off strangers paying stupid high prices for “vintage” items or herbal poultices with alligator dung. Who gives a fuck about Nicaraguan mineral water when there are people dying, people without homes, people who need a way out and not a god damn herbal poultice.

Shamus is a ghost of the East Village’s past, a walking shambles without a home and without a mind, the spirit of the fall and the panic and the search for an answer. He walks across the city looking for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. He’s too out of it to understand that the hipsters don’t know the past like he does. Where they see opportunity he see’s a playground for murderers. He mistakes the art crowd for the Nazi’s behind it all because the artists and the yuppies are the strangest things in town as far as he’s concerned.  

On the other hand, The Drowned Girl is also about the kind of guy that walks around the city sneering at hipsters for being hip and rich folks for being rich. He stalks the city opining on what the neighborhood used to be, but himself doesn’t have much to offer outside of insane ramblings and trespassing. The thing about gentrification and nearly every other social phenomenon is that the process taking place is incredibly complex, involving  thousands of independent agents, all acting with different motives, backgrounds, and social standings. It’s easy to say “Fuck gentrifiers!” The sentiment is one I’ve uttered once or twice. But neighborhoods with empty lots and abandoned buildings aren’t exactly happy neighborhoods. As hard as it is to put up with some chipper, privileged blowhard trying to sell you Nicaraguan mineral water, it’s much harder to argue in favor of chaos and disorder. Fun as those things can be, it ain’t sustainable living. 

All in all The Drowned Girl is fun to read. I wish I could I tell you where to get it, but it’s the sort of book you’ll have to scrounge around your local comic shop for. It’s also available from vendors on Amazon and Ebay. Do what you can. It’s cheap, and totally worth a read. 

We got jokes

"The world today"

In an effort to once and for all understand “ludology” (the study of [video]games and how they convey meaning), I googled “ludology” and latched onto the first interesting looking paper I could find. It happened to be a 2007 Ph.D. dissertation by Gonzalo Frasca, the guy who runs, or ran, Ludology.org. What follows is a fairly embalmed joke he dissects to illustrate what the elements of “play” and “games” are. 

By way of set-up, he explains that way back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries his home country Uruguay was overrun by working class illiterate immigrants from Spain, particularly from Spain’s northeastern region Galicia. As tends to happen when a large influx of language-impaired foreigners come in and do all the jobs the upper classes can’t bring themselves to do, the diverse Spanish immigrants were monolithically referred to as “Galicians” by the locals, and became the butt of many jokes.

As many of these jokes go, this particular one involves a Galician guy called Manolo (all Galicians in jokes are named Manolo, which is a common nickname for the name
Manuel.) A man is walking on the street and he runs into Manolo, who is frenetically feeding coins into a Coke vending machine. Manolo puts a coin in, retrieves a Coke can and repeats the process over and over again. The man, puzzled at the pile of unopened Coke cans sitting next to the vending machine, asks Manolo "Hey, what are you going to do with so many Coca-Cola cans?" Manolo keeps feeding the machine with coins and replies: "I donʼt know but as long as I keep winning, I'll keep playing!" 

The joke makes fun of Manolo, who is dumb enough to mistake a vending machine for a gambling one. Even though both machines are different enough, they have one big
element in common that may have caused Manoloʼs confusion: they both take coins. The main difference is that the Coke vending machine always delivers a can for a fixed amount of cash while the gambling one only exceptionally offers a reward. Both share a similar interface: a slot where you are supposed to introduce your coins. Both provide some kind of feedback: a soda can in the first case and hopefully a big cash reward on the second one.  

This joke is based on the elusive difference between play and not play –or, if you prefer, between play and work. Manolo confuses the vending machine with a game and he believes that he is enjoying a strike of good fortune. He does not see the Coke cans as the product of a purchase but rather as a reward from a game. Additionally, his final reply shows, he is not that much interested in the reward itself –the cans of Coke– but rather on the fact that he is winning. In his mind, he may be playing but to an external observer familiar with vending machines, he is not playing at all. Regardless of the designerʼs –and social– intentions towards the Coke machine, Manolo is enjoying himself and using the purchase mechanism for play. We may laugh at Manolo because we think that we know better (and technically we do) but he is having a good time and who are we to judge him?

In other news, The Misery Index has made it to page two of the Google search results for "gum dildo."

#moebiustime - The Incal meets the Pendleton

Thanks to Bryce Martin's bright idea, the king of insanely trippy fantasy/sci-fi (Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius a.k.a. Gir) has (finally?) met the kings of insanely trippy children's cartoons (Finn and Jake) by way of the right of artistic reinterpretation. Bryce asked a handful of artists, among them Brandon Graham (ISLAND, Multiple Warheads), to create illustrations that implanted Adventure Time characters in the worlds of French illustrator and comic artist Moebius. The resulting drawings work predictably well, given Adventure Time's infinite adaptability. Check out the art below, and #moebiustime for more.

Tristan Wright (@tristanatsirt - tristanwright.com)

M.L. McDonald (@Alchemichael7 - alchemichael.tumblr.com/)

Brandon Graham (@royalboiler - royalboiler.wordpress.com)

Michael Danielsen (@inradiator - radiacious.com)

Daniel Tuucaan Starflower (@crystalZONElife - underwatercrystalzone.com)

Object Anxiety / Art by Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker's first name is Rune, and he is from Denmark. He has a tumblr and I suggest you pay for the honor of hanging something of his in your domicile or corporate office.

Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker's drawings are things of manic surrealistic beauty. They are little battles waged eagerly between the persons depicted and the Armageddon around them, a world of alternating softness and certainty. Objects fall in clouds, shoot out in confetti spurts, in bomb blasts, swallowing, deforming, growing in blobs and clusters like tumors.

Rune Fisker

Rune Fisker

Google is trying harder than anyone else to make machine brains work

Backchannel has a fairly in-depth write up about Google’s scramble to hire or train programmers with experience in “machine learning” (aka artificial intelligence and neural networks). It’s betting hard on the technology’s ability to mine and interpret data in a way that’s not just novel, but also useful to it’s flagship Search app and more.

Deepmind, a British technology start-up that was bought by Google in 2014, and whose motto is “Solve intelligence,” was an early move for them. The company caught Google’s attention after they published an article detailing how one of their machine babies learned to play seven different Atari games well enough to pose a threat to human video game dominance. DeepMind also created AlphaGo, a machine learning program that whooped a “9 dan rank” human Go player in 2015. Additionally, the company is partly responsible for the DeepDream phenomenon of last summer. It was a neural network system that was able to take user-fed images and figure out terrifying ways to fuse them with puppies and slugs.

Google Brain / DeepMind HQ

Per the Backchannel article, Google has been “obsessed” with machine learning this year. Among their efforts so far: Pilfering any and all students of artificial intelligence guru Pedro Domingos of the University of Washington; allowing artificial intelligence engineers out of the mysterious Google X R&D basement and into daylight; posting flyers in the cafeteria bulletin boards of technical colleges across the country and the world: “Do you want to be a machine learning ninja????!” Google also made a powerful neural network building tool, TensorFlow, available to the public in November 2015, ostensibly to help build a generation of amateur programmers already familiar with machine learning, to be hired en-masse once they have degrees.

Machine learning is a new way of programming. From my limited understanding, it seems to be about creating semi-intelligent data golems to do your bidding, often to superhuman effect. Not only can a neural network learn and in a way understand what a shiba inu looks like (and find pictures of it for all your doge memes), it can use that understanding to then go through a pile of, say, a million pictures of dogs and doges of different breeds and then delineate between each different breed. “If it learns one breed,” reads the article, “it can use the same technique to identify the other 9999 using the same technique.”

Birth of a new God???

Machine learning can also, to a limited extent, understand language, which Google has put to use with its SmartReply feature. Per the article: “Traditional AI methods of language understanding depended on embedding rules of language into a system, but in [SmartReply], as with all modern machine learning, the system was fed enough data to learn on its own, just as a child would.”

Personally I like typing my replies and I think I always will, and, from what I read, SmartReply initially had the tendency to suggest “I love you” as a reponse whenever it sensed tension in the conversation. But other machine learning could be important, and, as this article will explain, Google is desperate to be at the forefront.

Artist Jennifer Linton reclaimed her life from the baby who stole it

Jennifer Linton created My Alphabet, (all of which is available to view on her website) as a way of reclaiming her life in the face of parenthood’s demands. She quotes the Guerrilla Girls, who in a 1989 poster quipped that women artists have “the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood.’” Linton defied the expectations of both so called “womanhood” and so called “adulthood,” by seizing “nap schedules and playdates as opportunities for creative output.” To many who feel the demands of real life are crushing to their true selves, she could be viewed as a sort of hero.

Your standard illustrated alphabet for children is depoliticized, and intentionally dumb. Usually involving animals and unremarkable objects -- O for Orange, T for Train -- they present the world in bits and idealized pieces that create a world of safe nonsense for our young ones, a fantasy zone where no one calls you fat, no one calls you a fag, and where the constant silent scream of the world at large can’t keep you from learning your ABCs.

Life is only a bit easier after learning the alphabet. Arguably, you’re one step closer to being able to read about the latest terrorist attack or Donald Trump tweet. But it’s disingenuous to say that Linton’s alphabet offers a more honest alternative to children’s literature. Linton's alphabet is for us, the sullied and profaned, we who have already had language imprinted on us and have suffered its ravages.

Typical childhood realness

What life is actually like

Illustrated alphabets for children are made for children by adults. They represent the world we want our kids living in, a world of smiling Apes eating Apples, a world where a Duck is fucking stoked to be beating a Drum, and where Frogs can wear Frilly dresses and Fans if they want to, Fuck the consequences. Illustrated alphabets by adults and for adults are invariably entirely about style, or entirely about sex, or entirely ironic. Ours is not a world of Bears eating Buns but of Bombs killing Babies, of Commercials asking for Cash.

In the end, Jennifer Linton seems to have succeeded where so many others have failed. She's integrated her family life with her artistic practice, in a way that doesn't compromise ideals, in a way that reminds us that the concepts that plague or control us in daily life are, in many respects, learned. 

You can buy Jennifer Linton’s alphabet in a “perfectly bound” edition (or as an ebook) at this Blurb.com page.

Some words with Zsófia Döme, Hungarian Treehugger and Illustrator

Zsófia Döme (http://zsofiadome.tumblr.com/) likes to get lost in the woods and draw the things she didn’t see, those things that imagination can’t help but see while surrounded by wild greenery teeming with hidden creatures. She is a Hungarian illustrator and a current student at the Hungarian School of Fine Arts. Rooted in a kind of grotesque and spooky fantasy aesthetic, her work exudes moodiness and mythology. She works in everything from playful creature studies to scenes lush with atmospheric tension, while incorporating just enough surreal quietness to make each image more than your average fantasy art.

I sent her a message on DeviantArt, because I had to find out more about her and what was behind the pictures. I began with the thing that stood out most for me: Zsófia’s use of surrealism, fantasy, and good old fashioned creepiness to make a visual statement about nature and what we call civilization. For the sake of completeness I’ll let you know that Zsófia’s English is in it’s “intermediate” phase, and I have taken the liberty of editing her answers to a point for clarity’s sake, hopefully not so much that you forget she’s Hungarian.

MR: The way you portray nature is kind of magical and foreboding at the same time. Where did your love of nature come from, and what goes through your mind drawing such lush scenes?

ZD: I had grown up in a small town in Hungary, and the love for nature comes from there. In my childhood we played in the tall grass, discovered the forest and sometimes we got lost, but we didn’t mind.

Nature can have a thousand faces. It could be the Garden of Eden where you can retire and meditate, but it could also be a place full of darkness, decadence and sickening things. For me it’s a mystical hideout where you can find interesting creatures in every corner. [….] It’s a kind of shelter for me. In my artworks every component has its own meaning on a deep, personal level.

Zsófia, who describes herself as a “tree-hugger,” on her DeviantArt, has a special connection with that natural world she liked getting lost in as a child. Whether she depicts nature as massive or miniscule, it’s always the uncontrollable and invasive, and at times violent and grotesque aspects of nature that shine through and give her work a little edge.

Most recently, Zsófia created a series of studies that pair drawings of (mostly) real life flowers and roots with those same plants sprouting eyes and little mouths and horrible little mutant limbs. It’s a study in giving a face to the plant world, a world that most forget is filled with living, breathing things— with life that grows, eats, moves and feels in its own way, but generally doesn’t have the facial structures necessary to show us how pissed off or ecstatic it might be about it all.

Birds I & II, Silent Lake, and No Way Out all seem to be done in the same style, and I was wondering if they were connected somehow, or were part of the same story, and if so what the project was. Am I just imagining it?

To be honest, the other half of my Birds series is still waiting in a forgotten corner of my laptop to be colored (Birds III, IV). Months have been passed after I finished the line art, but the coloring progress is stopped. I also wanted to upload some new works, but school deadlines kept me away. Maybe I can share some stuff later. The illustrations you mentioned all are separate pieces, except ‘Birds’. The style is the same of course, but I can’t explain why. I just felt this style fit to this kind of dark world, and I also found that is close to myself, as well. One of my friends said some time ago, once she discovers an interesting subject she draws until she exhausts the whole theme. In my case it’s almost similar, but it’s not about interests, rather about style. It’s very meditative and calming, when you are making dotwork or just draw leaves for hours.

These illustrations are begging to tell a story, but as of yet Döme is letting them stand alone. Her experiments in storytelling thus far are few, but promising. My favorites are her illustrations for a violently satisfying story called Anyagyilkossag (“Matricide”), by little known Hungarian author, psychiatrist, and certified murderous psychopath Géza Csáth. Döme was inspired after watching the movie The Whitman Boys, based on the Csáth story, to illustrate scenes from the story. After learning the story of Mr. Csáth life I had trouble reconciling the terms “tree-hugger” and “psychopath,” but Döme does a great job in her illustrations of capturing the story’s pathologically sardonic tone. (If you want, give the story a read here.)

I saw on your tumblr that you were working on a series of illustrations for a story by Geza Csath — “Anyagyilkossag” after you saw The Whitman Boys, which was based on the story. Is that project finished?

My illustrations represent a mood rather than events, as you can see in my works about Csáth’s stories. Yes, this project is finished and I still have others in progress. I really like Csáth’s works and I also regret that he didn’t write more stories during his short lifetime. As for the illustrations it was a short-lived project which was made for my own pleasure. It wasn’t published, but it would be a real honor to illustrate a whole volume.

Do you have any other illustrative projects in the works. What have you been working on lately?

My current project is called “My Wardrobe”. Nowadays I live in an old student hostel and the idea came there. The base of the project is a wardrobe which is used by my roommate and me. Imagine an ugly, old, dusty wardrobe with unclosable doors and a big mess inside. [It’s an interactive illustration where] you can click on the doors and have a look inside, but the small places hide more than only clothes, boxes, or shoes. There are tiny surreal words in every part of it. 

These days I’m more and more interested about connection of body and soul. With this current project I speculate about where is the soul within our body or how it can manifest through our environment and our personal things?

So you’re still a student?

I’ll get my degree next year, and I hope everything will go smoothly.

Could you name some artists or writers who’ve inspired you?

In my teenage years I was obsessed with anime and manga, cartoons and my early dream was to be a comic artist or an animator. After the high school I got into a fine arts university which was a huge twist for me. I got new perspectives about how to approach art, how to enjoy even the abstract pieces, which are the least understandable for the most people. [In school] my taste turned another way. I don’t mean that I completely gave up my early interests, just got new perspectives, new doors opened before me. In the future I’d like to find a balance between popular art and fine art. To be honest, it’s a bit hard, and I’m still growing and developing.

I’m inspired in many ways, with almost everything melancholic, lyric images mixed with a little bit of grotesque horror. As for art, I love pre-raphaelites, art nouveau, and surrealist works. Just a few names from my favorite artists: Max Ernst, George Grosz, Harry Clarke, John Bauer, Alan Lee, Arthur Rackham, Eyvind Earle, Theodor Kittelsen, Csaba Rékassy.

I often listen neofolk while drawing, sometimes a little bit of darkwave, but mainly folk metal, death metal, movie and game soundtracks. Medieval and Nordic sounds are the closest to my heart.

Here’s hoping to hear more from the Hungarian tree-hugger, the talented young Zsófia Döme. If you’d like a print, I encourage all money-havers to click to her Society6 page and buy one.