 Brendan Monroe lives in Chinatown. He will be graduating from Art Center Pasadena. He will be pursuing art. GR: Where are you in your art career? Where do you want to go? BM: I'm in the beginning. I hope to be doing this for a long time. At this point I want to go lots of places with my work. Illustration is a broad term. Whenever, however, and wherever I can make art is going to be a good place for me. As long as I keep working, I will figure it out.  GR: What do you feel is significant about your work? BM: I feel like if I can connect with a few individuals, then my work is doing it's job. I don't feel like it's made to change lives. I am only trying to do something different that people can enjoy.  GR: Which artists work do you enjoy looking at and why? BM: I like looking at lots. Some of them, I forget names, or I never know them at all. I just saw an amazing Tara Donovan installation. I love to see graffiti around town, Los Angeles is beautifully decorated. Barry McGee, Thomas Campbell, Os Gemeos, Banksy, Space Invader, Kami, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Alberto Giacometti, Edgar Degas, David Siqueros, Robert McGinnis, Robert Crumb, Edgar Payne, Jason Holley, Jonathan Wiener, Clayton Brothers, Tavis Coburn, Justin Wood, Camille Rose Garcia, Gary Taxali are some people I like. Also a lot of friends are big influences on me. GR: How do you approach and execute your work? BM: I think my best work comes out through simple doodling. It only takes one drawing. I like to spawn tons of ideas. I love to see how far can one thing be taken and explored. Can it be a painting, an installation, a dimensional sculpture, a comic book? Or maybe it should just stay a drawing. As far as executing the work goes, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want something to be. So I make it. Along the way, things always happen to make things change for bad or good. That's the fun part. I think a lot of artist must do that. Susie Ghahremani lives in Providence, Rhode Island. She plays in bands, makes cool things, and paints well.  GR: Where are you in your art career? Where do you want to go? SG: I can't imagine what the lifeline of my art career is going to look like, but I know I'm standing at the very beginning of it. I graduated from art school a couple years ago, got a job, and was making some things on the side, and then I quit the job in a sudden vision of other possibilities for these things (songs, comics, paintings) I was making. I started illustrating for magazines a couple months ago, and have been doing more and more art shows. Now, the excitement of being able to make things all day, every day, is overwhelmingly satisfying, and I work hard at it. I want to keep that and never take it for granted! GR: What do you feel is significant about your work? SG: I have a serious passion for the phenomenon that sometimes occurs when an image or song draws a world of thoughts and experiences with only a handful of hints and details.  GR: Which artists work do you enjoy looking at and why? SG: Joseph Cornell is everything I love about art; the secrets and hints I was talking about earlier. Also, I like Margaret Keane, whose beautiful, cynical paintings of Karen Carpenter-looking ladies make me feel wonderfully uneasy. And of course, Anna Sommer - especially her comics... her weird world is like no other, and it will suck you in. GR: How do you approach and execute your work? SG: itself, but I am aware that I have images and moments stored in my head that constantly try to escape me. I sit on the floor of my apartment and start working with one small idea and before I know it, it's transformed into something - a painting, a song, a letter to my mom.  |