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»Every creature has their own unique lens on the world«
The works of artist and graphic designer J.S. Weis from Portland, Oregon, let nature and consumerism collide – and show us the world anew
But the ecosystem of products is an ecosystem of waste.
That is part of the problem. In the natural ecosystem, waste is never waste. It gets consumed by fungi and other scavengers. But our man-made system is not capable of that, so it’s full of waste. We’re all feeling and seeing it.
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Even in the water . . . You had a startling experience snorkeling in Puerto Rico.
Oh yes. I had to swim out past floating beer cans, plastic bags, and a sneaker. But a quarter mile further, I suddenly saw Caribbean reef squids that can change their color and also brown pelicans that were catching fish. It was really magical for me to see all these rhythms of nature. That was a juxtapose against all this trash. In my work I’m trying to hold those two thoughts simultaneously and to explore the tensions between them.
Your experience sounds like a very beautiful and very sad moment at the same time.
Yes, that’s accurate. And it’s a moment that stuck with me. I’m looking out of my window right now and it’s always that mix of natural and man-made.
Often it is hard to tell what’s natural anymore because we’ve changed the planet so much.
You’re right. When you look at the sky, clouds can be man-made and there are the contrails of the airplanes.
People have always fiddled with the environment so that it better suited us. And it’s not even a unique human behavior, because beavers and plenty of other animals do it too. But we definitely take it to an extreme. I don’t know if I’ve been in a perfectly intact ecosystem ever. I’m thinking of Yosemite. It’s so beautiful that lots of people come to visit, but driving through is a highly engineered experience. Or here in the Pacific Northwest where I live, you see a lot of trees along the highways. But that doesn’t mean that’s natural. Because less than ten percent of the old growth forest here is intact and those trees are grown in order to be harvested later.
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When did all these observations become part of your work?
In college, I tried on lots of different styles and themes. But I always kept circling back to nature. I just like looking at how a leaf, an animal, or an insect is structured and I enjoy painting or drawing them. But every time I would do that, I couldn’t get out of my mind how endangered nature is. So, I tried to find a way to put those two ideas together.
At one point you started calling yourself an (un)naturalist.
I changed that to “trashy naturalist” (laughs). I try to draw things that are carefully observed, like a naturalist would, and then bring the man-made elements into it. I thought that term encapsulates this best.
And now you’re also working on a book that lets you dive into the ocean visually.
It started out as one book, but I had to split it in two. One is Letters to the Duck, the other The Fable Ocean, and I’m going back and forth between them. The first one is about a person reflecting on the material wealth of their childhood with all these toys and wondering where they ended up. It’s influenced by a true story about a container that fell into the water on the high seas with thousands of toys in it that later appeared in all different kinds of places. The other stories are dark fables about anthropomorphized animals and also set in the ocean.
How do you decide which animal to paint? Do you have any favorites?
Probably the octopus. I painted more octopuses than any other animals. They are invertebrate, highly intelligent, and come from a completely different evolutionary path. Their intelligence is diffused through their body. So how does it feel to experience the world when your brain is all throughout your body? How is it to taste things by touching them or to change your skin texture and color? Every creature sees the world through their own unique lens. But I find the traits that an octopus has especially interesting. They’re so different from us.
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And the other animals? How do you choose them?
The piece I’m working on right now, I started after I saw a pizza slice hovering over the ground in the parking lot of my building. It was like a ghost pizza, because it was just floating (laughs). But then I saw that there was a squirrel behind it hauling the pizza off into the woods. That’s how the idea of a pizza party in nature evolved. But it’s always different. Sometimes behavior is decisive for choosing a certain animal, sometimes its ecosystem, sometimes it’s just intuition.
How would you describe your style? How did it develop?
Lately, I think it‘s influenced by the classically posed naturalistic prints from John James Audubon into which I’m introducing man-made stuff.
But it has much more emotion in it than the naturalistic prints and a special intensity.
It would be wonderful if that were so. Much of the mood in the naturalistic prints is conveyed through the sky and the lighting – or even a storm. I don’t work with that. But as soon as you put in the trash, a subtext is there.
How do you develop your works?
I’ll do sketches and sometimes a photo collage. A lot of my ideas come from Google searches. I can go hours just looking at different images. The last thing I was studying were balloons. Usually, they don’t intersect with my life at all. But there are so many different kinds and it’s a job designing them. Once I have an idea for the ingredients of a painting, I do a little bit of sketching and maybe the composition. It’s like the mood boards you sometimes make in graphic design. When I start to paint, I get to the big shapes and flat areas of color first. But then I don’t do it in any particular order. I just jump around. It’s chaos (laughs). I just do whatever feels good.
And how do you decide if you do something in color or in black-and-white?
For me, it’s good to switch between color and black-and-white, and sometimes even quit painting in color for a while. I then appreciate it more afterwards and I’m seeing the colors more precisely than before. I think I just go through phases.
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It’s not like birds have to be in color because they’re so beautiful?
I did a black-and-white of a cormorant. They do not have the most colorful plumage, but their eyes have a gorgeous color. I was a little sad that I couldn’t show it. But I can always do it another time (laughs). I don’t know if I would pick a parrot to do in black-and-white. But they have a really fascinating beak shape and the structure of a body can be very interesting too. And as people are so used to the brightness of parrots it can be interesting to take the color out and to focus on something else.
After college, you worked as a graphic designer and you still do. Where do these two worlds meet?
Definitely on the aesthetic side. Trying to come up with good compositions, with interesting colors, and that things feel balanced. I do love really good graphic design. I worked as a graphic designer with agencies and tech places. I did illustrations for Facebook, brandings for restaurants and things like that. But I also worked in screen-printing and I think that influenced my art when I started to paint again several years later. In order to make money, some screen-printing places do junky products like plastic pens with the company’s logo on them. Even back then it seemed such an outdated and wasteful promotional idea. Sometimes I think all my art afterwards is also about working out some guilt (laughs). I’ve never enjoyed selling things. And the hard part in graphic design is often the intent behind it. It’s part of the ecosystem of products which I’m questioning in my art.
When you say you appreciate really good graphic design – what is that for you?
It’s the aesthetics. The other night I was at a dinner for my aunt’s 70th birthday. My cousin was talking about some Japanese barbecue sauce she bought because she really liked the graphic design on the package. That was the start of her engagement with that product. Good graphic design does that for people. I like old packaging that seems fussy to our current aesthetic because there’s just so much going on. I have a tobacco tin that has a paper seal on it that is so detailed it looks like a banknote. But I also like modern designs. It can be really everything.
How do you choose your graphic design projects? I looked through some of your work and the beaver with the golden teeth for the Hardwood Bar & Smokery looks so nice and funny, as do the food illustrations for the restaurant Manhattan House.
For anything I do, I want the craft to be good. And there’s a social aspect to graphic design. When you collaborate with people, it can be really fun to share your ideas and to try out different ones.
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Being in the middle of climate change, your work is frighteningly up-to-date. Do you think it has the power to drive change? Or to give hope?
I understand myself as an observer. And my art is about what I see. I often ask myself what it would do to us psychologically when in 200 years nature will be re-ally precarious, so many species gone, when we have monocultures of corn and completely engineered ecosystems. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I would much rather live with hope. I think people have an amazing capacity to change the world. But our focus isn’t where it needs to be right now. So maybe I’m trying out different ways to bring it into focus. I am definitely not saying we’re doomed, but I am saying we’re in trouble. We all know that.
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