I became familiar with your work through the first Sonatina Comics anthology. Does the proximity to other people’s work in an anthology like that affect the content of your work?

A little bit. I’m actually just starting a piece that’s for an anthology, and I feel like I have a different approach in terms of experimenting. It’s not as high stakes as trying to put out a full book, or even self-publishing something. All I have to do is provide these files, and then it’s out of my hands. I mean, it’s always exciting to know who else is in it, because then you get an idea of the type of comics that will be around. The [anthology] I’m doing right now has a general theme to it, and it’s fun to keep that in mind—to imagine what type of imagery to start with. Usually it’s a much more fluid type of creation. I don’t have a lot to worry about. I just see what happens.

Would you ever consider directly collaborating with someone on a comic? Like having someone else do half of the drawings or writing, or something like that?

I don’t know if I could handle that. I’m pretty controlling with images, at least. [Collaboration] is not something I could imagine happening, really. I have done a little bit of adapting other people’s work into a comic. That’s something that I find really exciting and cool because you’re working with someone who doesn’t have the same vision of it, or visuals associated with it. Whereas if you’re working with another visual artist, they’ll always have a certain design aesthetic that would be harder to compromise with—or at least I’d be harder to compromise with.

Do you come up with the words after the visuals, or do you think of them together?

It’s pretty different for every story I’ve done. It depends on what I’m trying to do. If I’m trying to do a long story, as it starts to develop I make an actual plan, or else it’s kind of scary to just keep forging ahead. For shorter work, it’s pretty much simultaneously constructed. I see where the visuals start to lead and create narrative and dialogue within that. It’s really open.

Your comics often play with negative space. I was wondering when you started doing that, or if there was any other work that inspired you to do that?

Not that I can think of. I mean, it’s been funny working in comics because I’m not super influenced by them. I was coming from what I was doing as an illustrator, or from fine arts practice. Especially working in pencil and erasing a lot and slowly removing unnecessary elements. I learned that I don’t have to show everything, and that I could use things as symbols for other things. I just gradually reduced the process. I think that After Nothing Comes shows that progression, which is cool. The pages get, like, emptier and emptier throughout the book. [Laughs]

I feel like your Instagram account captures the same energy that your comics do. Do you think that documenting your life online helps you in your art practices?

Yeah, I think so. I love my Instagram. It’s one of those things that’s so funny in life. It feels really vapid or silly or something, but it makes you pay attention to the world in a different way. It makes you understand your aesthetic better, totally. It’s silly to be like, I love making hashtags or something, but it’s a really interesting play of juxtaposition. To be like, Do I want this to come off as silly? Or do I want this to come off as weird and dark? There are so many ways to affect your image based on the text that you add to it. I didn’t have an iPhone until this year, and when that happened I was like, Oh my god, I can use emojis now to pair with my Instagram. That was really exciting. Another level of controlling or malleability. It’s really fun. It definitely is like a game of visuals.

How does your art practice differ when it is going to be shown in a gallery rather than in a book or zine?

That’s still changing and developing, but I just try to think of what context it’s in. To me, the biggest difference is when someone has a book, they’re going to carry it around, and it’s going to be with them. They get to have this really intimate time with it, they can reread it. It’s a private experience, and they’re looking at every element of every page. If you put that exact thing up on a wall in a gallery or something, no one really spends that much time looking at work, unfortunately. It depends, but a lot of people will go to an opening and not really get the chance to revisit it and dig into it. So when I think of gallery stuff, I make it interact with the space, but also make it something that someone can take in in a short amount of time. It maybe doesn’t get as deep, in certain ways. But it can start to touch on elements that I try to touch on in the longer book format, too. More and more, I’ve been working on sculptural work, which is a nice outlet, and a nice way of recomposing the way I draw into something that’s different but can maybe have the same tones to it.

Much of your work is done in pencil, but when you do use color, your selections are so vivid and tonal. How do you choose utensils?

For drawing, I’m pretty much stuck in my little zone. I haven’t varied too much in a long time. It’s pretty much just a mechanical pencil, Holbein Acryla Gouache, and super smooth vellum Bristol [paper]. It’s super specific. [Laughs] They’re the perfect tools that I’ve found. At this point, it’s nice to not think about materials, so when I’m starting a comic it’s all about content. For the other work I’ve been making for galleries, it’s a bit more experimental, like having work reproduced on silk. I’ve started making a lot of metal jewelry pieces. There’s still a precious quality to it that relates to how my work looks on paper.

Do you have any advice for people who are younger and trying to be confident with what they make?

I’ve talked about this with my roommate, who is an artist, too. We’ve known each other a long time, and we lived in Portland at similar times. We were pretty balls-out in our youth, and it just wasn’t necessarily something I thought about at the time, but I think that all of it has been good for me. I just wasn’t self-conscious, or didn’t think to be self-conscious. It was such an internalized process: When you’re drawing alone and you print things and reproduce things alone. I knew of a few shops that sold zines, so I would just go to them and talk to those people. I never thought about the audience, or about being judged. I think that’s what people are really scared of, but that’s not something that takes place in front of you, ever. Enough people found my work that way, and it got me in touch with people. Sharing my work opened more doors than it could have shut. It’s scary to do it, but there are so few negative things that can come from it that it’s worth it. The same with internet stuff, too. So many of those platforms are about support, about positive reinforcement, and about community. I think engaging in that is a great way to start building your confidence and building your audience. I was really active on Flickr, for starters. I made a lot of friends there and traded comics from all around the world and eventually met all the people that I was talking to and became real friends with them. It’s so amazing. The number of friends I got from sharing work on the internet is crazy. It’s really beautiful. ♦