Today we’d like to introduce you to Anthony Lewellen.
Anthony, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
From as far back as I can remember I have been fascinated by art, drawing in particular. A very early formative memory was a teacher I had in kindergarten who would draw on the chalkboard and watching that process resonated with me in a very profound way. I didn’t know if that was something that I thought I was capable of doing myself but I wanted to try. Most of my earliest exposure to drawn images was through cartoons and comics, which remained a steady interest and influence for years. I started hand drawing my own comics and selling them at school. A few years later I was genuinely surprised when I started winning little art contests here and there. I was an art major in high school and was fortunate to be part of a really great studio art class that exposed me to working with lots of different materials and methods. I was one of the students that got to work with Keith Haring on the mural project he did in Chicago in the late 1980’s, which was the first mural I ever worked on. It was an experience that changed my life. I was very into skateboarding which allowed me to see and explore the city in ways I never had before. When skate culture and graffiti culture began to overlap more and more in the early 1990’s graffiti seemed like a very natural extension for me. It ended up becoming pretty much all I did for the next several years and defined a lot of what I would do later on. For a kid growing up in the city with artistic inclinations and not a lot of access to things it was an ideal outlet and platform. I started out with just getting up like everyone else but quickly realized the potential for more as my long-time interest in drawing and painting started to merge with what I was doing on the street which led to experimenting with painting more complex things and I sort of fell in love with the way you could work with spray paint. It was also a way of getting what I was thinking out of my head and into the world. It was all pretty new at the time so it felt a bit like uncharted territory. Over the year’s things just sort of evolved from there, all of it centered around a love of drawing and painting. Even with a solid background in graffiti art, from the very beginning I have always just thought of myself as an artist the need to categorize what I was doing never seemed as important as the work itself.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My time now is spent pretty equally between large-scale public and private mural commissions and personal studio work. I work a lot with spray paint. I have sort of created my own approach that makes use of spray paint, acrylics and ink. I just have sort of embraced al the dynamics of the medium but also like to have the freedom to work with anything that will achieve what I want. I use an airbrush too. It is a lot of experimentation involved. Most of the mural work I do is done with spray paint for the most part. It’s an ideal medium for that kind of work in my opinion. I use latex sometimes as well. I think for most artists there is a compulsion to create, a desire to make something, for me a lot of that stems from a place of curiosity. Many times, I start a piece of work just because I want to see what it will look like. I want to know what will come out of going down a certain path with an idea. I like the process of working things out. Most of what I create is drawn from life in the city, the people, the buildings, the streets, the sounds. My work is a mixture of figurative and abstract elements. It’s representational in a stylized way and often metaphorical or symbolic. For years my studio work was mostly on paper or found wood but I recently started working on canvas. I’m often told my work feels like Chicago.
My studio work is very personal tends to center around experiences, ideas or images that have resonated with me on an intuitive level. I’m not conceptual in the sense that I create things with a specific purpose in mind or message or meaning to get across. When I’m in the studio I find myself referring to it as “lab time” and that is really how I think of it. Most of that work is about exploring ideas, seeing if things will work, trying things out, and in general just being about the practice of making art. I have literal stacks of sketches all over the place with things I want to do but just haven’t gotten to yet. They are like notes for future experiments.
The large-scale public mural work I do is usually commissioned based so it’s very different in terms of how the ideas are developed or what they center around. It is a different set of challenges with different parameters. How they develop is usually a collaboration with whoever is commissioning the work. You bring all your skills, sensibilities and aesthetics as an artist to the table but you are applying them to a specific project. Particularity with work that exists in a public space I always feel a responsibility to do my best to respond to that space in a meaningful way with and understanding of how people interact with it and will experience the work. I enjoy the challenge of site-specific projects and figuring out how to work with the unique dynamics of a location. All of the above applies to private mural commissions as well but you don’t have to watch the weather quite as closely.
What I do feels very much about filtering. You sort of take all these things in as an individual and process and refine them and then bring them back into the world in a new way. In a way that only you could have done as a unique individual with your unique life experiences. I’ve called myself an urban imagist and I think that pretty accurately describes and possibly defines my work. It’s not something I set out to do it’s the natural process of having been born in a place, having lived and breathed in so much of a place that it is a much a part of you as you are a part of it. I don’t know what kind of artist I would be if I had been born in another place, in another time.
In your view, what is the biggest issue artists have to deal with?
One of the things I think is the most challenging for a visual artist in particular is living in a time in history with an unparallel level of media saturation. One of the very things that has allowed so many artists reach wider audiences and keep them connected and up to date on what you do has also made it difficult for everyone to wade through the massive volume of images and media that is out there and have a meaningful level of engagement with things you really care about or are interested in. I also think we all have shorter attentions spans as a result. If you don’t see new posts from someone on a near daily basis it can be easy to have them sort of bumped out of your thinking, not for lack of interest but there is just so much else that will easily fill the void. I have found myself wondering if it is better for an artist to share less but of more substance rather than cater to and continue to propagate the level of frenetic and constant feed. I’ve done both at various times.
I think these are the kind of questions you end up asking yourself. Also, I think the temptation to create work that caters to what people respond to is more of a factor with this level of interaction. Hypothetically speaking if I painted a red circle and posted it and it got 200 likes and lots of positive comments and painted a blue circle and it go 10 likes and no comments would I then be inclined to paint more red circles and would that be a good or bad thing for me as an artist. It could be said of every period of history at the time but there has been such a rapid acceleration in how technology has changed the way we live in such a short amount of time it really feels like an unprecedented societal shift and as an artist living and working in that context there are dynamics both good and bad that no other artist in history have had to contend with.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
I have quite a few murals around the city and more planned in the not too distant future. You can see a lot of what I do on my site or by following me on social media. I post or tag locations for things I’ve done in the past or am currently working on. I’m most active on Instagram my handle is @antckone which my graffiti name is. It’s a phonetic spelling of the word antic, which is a play on my name Anthony, and a nod to the fact that I’m a bit crazy. I have my first solo show in a while opening on July 28th at Chicago Truborn on in Westtown in conjunction with the completion of a large-scale mural along Chicago Avenue.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.anthonylewellen.com
- Phone: 3123512309
- Email: anthony@alewellen.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/antckone
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/A.lewellenStudio
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/Alewellen
- Other: https://vimeo.com/anthonylewellen
Image Credit:
Bio/Personal photo by Max Weissman
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