L: How long has it been since that happened? How long would you say you’ve been working professionally in this business?

M: I went to Cal-Art from 2013 to 2016, so when I graduated in 2016 I had my thesis film, ‘Hot-Dog Hands’, which went around to different festivals. I already had a film called ‘Bottom Feeders’ do pretty well, going around to different festivals, introduced me to a lot of people at South by Southwest in 2015. So even while I was at Cal-Art, I was starting to do work here and there for, you know, either working developing an animatic that then became a show for Warner Brothers… Working on more independent stuff, freelance projects for like Fox Sports, but it wasn’t until I graduated that really I had work that was out there, that people were seeing, that was then getting me being asked to do music videos or titles for the film ‘Villains’ by Bron Studios… It really took off after 2016.

L: From 2016 to now, what would you say are the biggest challenges that you’ve encountered professionally working in this business as an animator, graphic artist, sculptor…?

M: Maintaining a presence in a pretty saturated market with lots of very talented people is very dificult… And you’re working with creative directors who have very little time for turnaround, and so a lot of times they’re just looking to the first person who pops up on their Instagram feed. I’m not great at Instagram, I actually really despise that that’s a big part of the job, of continuing to be like “I’m still here, I’m still making work and I make the work that you wanna see”… You gotta just keep putting yourself in front of these people. Some people have lists of artist whose work they really appreciate and of course, building relationships to work on multiple projects over and over again but for the most time they’re looking for more and more new stuff or artists they haven’t worked with. So that is incredibly hard, which is why over a year ago I took a full time job where I’m a teaching artist. And I work with a non-profit, I’m teaching media arts, so I’m teaching graphic design, I’m teaching animation, photography, and filmmaking at different schools in South Los Angeles. And then I have this time outside of that to do my own practice, I don’t have to take all the jobs that come my way, where someone’s like “hey, I’m making this short film and it’s about…”, I don’t know, whatever, something really stupid and I don’t wanna do it. So I can say “nope, I’m good, I’m working on my own thing” or “I’m doing my own practice”, and I’m paying my bills cause I have a full time job. So I recognize that that’s not the avenue that everyone goes for, because it’s really what you’re interested in is creating, you know, applied arts. If you’re creating, you wanna create graphic designs for a brand or animations for a client. Being a teaching artist isn’t exactly for that. And it’s also, not a field that there’s a lot of people in support for, but I’ve really found it to be a nice model and every now and then I have time to do something but haven’t been all that often, to be honest.

L: Awesome! Yeah, when you say you teach, after you step out of the classroom and you start working in the work you do as an artist, where do you take inspiration from? What inspires you when it’s time to do a sculpture or create an illustration? What do you see, where do you take inspiration from? How does your process work?

M: Oddly, where I ended up now, a lot of the work that I do for my own portfolio of work is sculpture work. And drawing inspiration, the forms that I work with, they come from all over the place. From architecture, they come from science-fiction, they come from biology, they come from cartoons. I work a lot with cartoons and cartoon vernacular as a place of, creating a placeful arena but it’s also still kind of threatening or weird, or horrifying and humorous, I like those two things together. I guess looking at old educational materials, like I love Ernst Haeckel as an illustrator of bizarre sea creatures and stuff like that. I’m a big fan of the ‘Alien’ movies, I love those H.R. Giger forms that he created that kinda created it’s his own typology of, his own morphology of these things. If an object was to expand, it has certain moves that happen at the ends of that object… And all seems very much part of our world, but then also a totally alien world, so a lot of concept artists like that seed me… Moebius, the canon of science-fiction visualizers, I love drawing from that kind of world.

L: Yeah, I see the sci-fi inspiration in your work definitely. You know, when we were talking about doing this interview, you asked us if we’re gonna be focused on sculpture, or illustration, because you do a lot of things as an artist. I would have to ask you: which one do you enjoy the most out of everything that you do?

M: They all serve different mediums, different itches that I need to have satisfied. Like the sculpture is very immediate, is tactile, I can be listening to something… My hands are doing the analytical work, in a way, of synthesizing that I don’t even know why, what their association is, it’s compelling to me and then realizing “oh, it looks kinda like, you know, biological or architectural, I’ve seen this somewhere”. Or it’s creating some sense of narrative, but really animation is when you’re really learning how things move, and animation is what taught me how to draw. I feel like I was drawing all my life, but to really draw, animation is what will make you draw something a gazillion times, really like close your eyes, conceptualize something, rotating tridimensionally in your mind and then trying to imitate that in two dimensions is difficult, and you have to do it over and over and over again. So I find animation really gratifying. Particularly, hand drawn animation when I’m really trying to work on that muscle that’s like: how do I take something that’s in here and execute it? Or like, have it manifest that side of myself. Because I think drawing is really important, specifically for that kind of communication and it’s animation that gets you to draw something over and over again, so you keep that muscle nice and sharp. And then, working with illustration and static, two-dimensional artwork is really great. I haven’t been in that mood recently, so I kinda move around and right now I’m definitely in sculpture mode with little animation projects here and there.

Animation

06 Articles

Norman McLaren, a pioneer in animation

From Console to Screen: The Evolution of Video Game Adaptations

The craft of stop-motion animation

X-Men ‘97: comics, cartoons & nostalgia

Matt Reynolds: Inside his unique world

The Story Of Fleischer Studios