ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Kerry Wright Zentner

By Kerry Freek

Posted June 4th, 2007

MONDO: Good afternoon, Kerry Zentner. Thank you for meeting me here, in the email domain. I would like to ask you some questions about your fabulous artwork. Starting… now: You draw a plethora of unusual characters. What are you thinking when you draw these beings?

KWZ: This is probably the question I get asked most often, and simultaneously the one that is most difficult to answer because the process is largely intuitive. I certainly don’t set out with a defined goal. Occasionally a particular shape or concept will present itself to me, sometimes in a dream. I used to draw more abstractly as a child and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was building a sort of repertoire of shapes and textures, which I use to this day. Nowadays I usually try to approach a blank canvas from a blank state of mind and let my unconscious do most of the work. Once my mind is relatively empty of static, I am stripped down to a few central emotional urges which dominate and guide the imagery. Most of the creatures seem to become highly anxious and sorrowful, or else nefarious and scathing. This kind of predator/prey dynamic is highly important to me, and I feel like most of the characters I create filter down through this system of abuse and domination, whether I’m distinctly aware of it at the time or not. I aim to make the system more naturalistic, though, and not exaggerated or caricatured. The way that life plays out in the animalistic realm is definitely of interest to me. A third category also exists in addition to predator and prey, a spiritual type of creature that seems wholly satiated and unconcerned, bemused at times. This is a primal spiritual state. These creatures usually come out of hiding when the ocean of mind-static is at its most placid and all the floor-dwellers have receded into their apertures. Despite this, there is definitely a strain of existential distress behind…everything I do. And wherever that strain is diminished, absurdity seems to take over the rest.

MONDO: Collaboration is a huge part of your artistic processes. You do group drawings, exquisite corpses, and participate in comic jams. What attracts you to group efforts?

KWZ: I’m tempted to say that it’s because it allows me to shirk artistic responsibility of the art, since I am not its sole creator. This alleviates pressure and makes the whole process more enjoyable. Of course, the reason is something much more intimate and profound than that. I’ve been working with my co-conspirators, William A. Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins, both of them with tremendous creative minds of their own, for the last four years or so. In that time we’ve done hundreds of drawings, some collaborative writing, improvised experimental music, etc. It’s just what we do when we hang out, that, and watch cartoons. I owe my interest in collaboration and a lot of my artistic motivation to them. I think that as a solo artist you stagnate and lose interest in what you’re doing at times, and you have to try to add some variables to make it interesting again. When you collaborate, those variables are thrown in effortlessly by the other participants, so you suddenly have all this material that you have to adapt to and try to make your own. You learn very well how to navigate an image, seeing which elements synthesize and which do not. It’s a process of discovering your own limits of aesthetic. Because it allows you to be so experimental, you begin to see new developments in your own style, which you definitely take and apply to your individual work. Having said that, though, I see working individually and working collaboratively as two equal modes of production. When we started drawing together it was just a kind of fun distraction, but when you work so closely with just a few other people, your styles begin to get a lot more cohesive and you admire it a bit more. We’ve even started throwing variables into the group, adding collage elements and colour, which had been largely untouched. It’s definitely getting interesting.

MONDO: What/who influences your work? Which artists do you appreciate and/or admire?

KWZ: The Surrealists will have to enter into this at some point, as I was practically raised under the Surrealist Manifesto, collaborative art being a foundation for much of their activity. Max Ernst in particular interests me. Though I only acquired it recently, Une Semaine de Bonte , a book of his collage work, has been inspiring. I adore Edward Gorey, Marcel Dzama, Jim Woodring, Richard A. Kirk. I could talk about each of these artists at length. A list of my influences isn’t complete without the work of Dr. Seuss, William Steig, and Bill Peet, all of whom had profound effects on me as a child. My mother’s dolls (she’s a doll artist) used to frighten me, I think that affected me. Lately, I’ve been really enjoying Mat Brinkman and Marc Bell comics. The list goes on, but the visual art only accounts for so much of the total inspiration. Essentially I’m influenced by whatever I’m immersed in at the moment, whether that’s literature, films, nature itself, etc. In that sense, inspiration is more of a lifestyle than anything. I’m always conscious of balancing my input and output frequencies.

MONDO: You are both a writer and a visual artist. What attracts you to each discipline? Do you have a preference?

KWZ: I would call myself a writer only very modestly. I’ve been lucky enough to come from a strong artistic community involved in a diverse range of disciplines, so I’ve never felt limited to any one type of creativity. If I find an author, say, that is particularly inspiring, I might get motivated to write. And then I’ll write for a week and forget about drawing and music. It’s a huge problem, because there’s a constant orgy of art in my head. It sounds great but it isn’t always conducive to good working habits, because each interest is trying to dominate the others. It’s a competitive orgy. There’s some crosspollination between interests, though. For instance, sometimes a passage in a book will inspire me to play guitar, or music will inspire me to draw, and I’ll just put on a Sigur Ros or Leonard Cohen album and it’s like going into a highly productive coma for a while. Those purely concentrated moments are rare, though. A lot of the time I’m clinging to the inspiration and trying to sustain it, rather than actually being creative.

MONDO: Last week we went to the Small Press Book Fair and you knew a number of the tablers. Through your own connections, and, in a position unique to most, you grew up surrounded by influential players in the Toronto experimental literary scene. Do you ever feel pressure to produce great things?

KWZ: I was surrounded with such a wealth of interesting activity, as a child, and such a lush artistic backdrop, that more than anything I think I was just inspired. There were a lot of people doing interesting things around me. Being the youngest in the poetry community and having a beloved poet for a father, as well as a brother who is a writer, added some pressure in the context of that scene, but it was great because it challenged me and gave me something to try and work towards, I wouldn’t trade that for anything, they’re both amazing writers and I love their work. Of course there’s always some pressure in a community to gain acceptance from your peers. I remember wanting to write an absurdist novel when I was twelve. I got about ninety pages in before I lost the train of thought, though I had already abandoned it on page one. Looking back at it, it’s a deranged and vomitory piece of writing with a few very eloquent bits at its heart. I’ve never shown it to anybody and I don’t intend to. I think I had become too concerned with audience and less with the drive to authenticity, which is one of the most important things to discover as an artist.

Now that I’m considerably older, I understand the ways in which one specializes and forms their own sensibilities, their own pockets, their own jewels, and I’m less concerned with being liked or understood by a lot of people. My impulse now is usually not to produce ‘great’ things, but horrendous things, things of a specific type of beauty which is at once disconcerting and luminous. In other words, I’ve specialized aesthetically. Being that I was partly home-schooled, I had a lot of time to discover my own interests, and I feel grateful to have been in close proximity to people who had really eclectic tastes which were influencing me (my father used to read Finnegans Wake to me before bed). Pressure is not a bad thing if you also have support. One drives you while the other allows you to find authenticity. Each is functionless without the other, and would breed apathy. I’ve been lucky to have very little needless pressure put upon me.

MONDO: Last question aside (sorry for the psychological pressure), do you have plans for future artistic endeavours?

KWZ: Today I put jam on a banana and ate it, that was kind of an artistic endeavour. I think I might do that again.

all content is copyright of the authors, 2007 — email us! editor [at] mondomagazine.net
hurrah!