Its funny how things change new foto!

Lowercase interview!

I first met Michael Latimer whilst exploring the fecalface website, I saw his art work and it just jumped out at me, I needed to talk to this guy and I desperately wanted to buy one, unfortunately for the both of us it quickly became apparent that there was no way I could afford any of his work, until now. In 2006 Michael launched Lowercase industry

Phil:
hey Mike hows it going?

Michael:
Not too bad sir

Phil:
good good, so for those who dont know you tell us a little bit about yourself

Michael:
nothing overly exiting to tell i'm afraid, I am a scruffy modern gentleman from the north of england that spends too much time alone with his pencil

Phil:
Tis the style of the times, and speaking of style recently you set up lowercase industry, what bought about the decision to do it?

Michael:
well, I have a day job doing straight graphic / web design which can get a bit tedious sometimes, so i've allways needed a kind of vent where i can create things that isnt following anyone elses guidlines. Before i would just create things and not really go anywhere with them I was getting alot of positive comments about my stuff, so i decided to try and actually build something on the back of all this stuff i was making, It was a long process learning the techniques to get my work ready for screen printing onto shirts, finding suppliers that were reliable etc. I'm still learning now, thats one of the great things about it.

Phil:
Yeah I mean we've all walked into shops and bought clothes (hopefully) but to be on the otherside of it, the one making it and selling deffiently looks like a challenge, what does it feel like knowing that people are buying you're hard work?

Michael:
its amazing, its the greatest compliment i can think of and to be honest, it migbht seem like hard work sometimes, but in reality its not at all, i would be making this stuff regardless of wether it went on a shirt or print. Thats what i'd like to think Lowercase Industry stands for, we dont churn products out, everything we put out has been made with love, sounds kind of cheesy i know, but its true I mean, i'm doing a tatoo design for someone at the moment, a full top arm and chest sleeve, its unbelievable that someone would like my style enough to have it permenantly etched into their skin. again, its really flattering.



Phil:
Well you must be doing something right for someone to want to have it with them for the rest of their lives, so how did you get into art?

Michael:
Its been a wierd path really, as a kid i allways drew things. As i got to my mid to late teenage years though i kind of left it behind and kind of stumbled through life not really knowing what i wanted to do with my life.
Iended up working lots of shitty factory jobs and it didnt look good. I think i eventually though enough is enough and really looked hard at what i was good at and how I could use it to do something with. I dimly remembered i used to enjoy art, so i made a decision to take a Multimedia design course in sheffield. It was like someone turning a light back on in my head, I kind of rediscovered that part of myself that would sit creating things for hours on end as a kid. It almost makes me feel quite emotional thinking about it.

Phil:
Yeah I know what its like to work in a factory, I worked in the depo of a company whos name will be with held, my job was to sort out wet crates into different piles, what made it worse was the room was reffigerated, I hated going there and it just made me angry, I was just weekend staff working there full time I'd of gone mad. Even though you hated it do you think working shitty jobs and you're life back then has had an influence on you're art work?

Michael:
definatly, i think everything you do influences what you make and who you are. Some of the jobs i worked were dark, like working in a sandwhich factory with my hands in a bucket of ice cold prawns all night. But i dont regret it at all, its good to go through some kind of struggle, if you look at some people who go straight to art school or whatever, thats all good but what experience have theyhad in life, i mean like real gritty life. Maybe that sounds a bit negative, i dont mean it to be, i just think if you've been out in the world, you are going to have more to say about the world because you've been there in the trenches i didnt so much hate the jobs i was working either, i think i was just a bit blinded to other options at that time

Phil:
Yeah I mean some of the greatest artists I've ever met have had parts of their lives that have been or in some cases are a real struggle, maybe it creates a desire in people to get out of the crappy situation they've ended up being in

Michael:
yeah. i mean i dont want to sound too dramatic about it. It just rienforces what i said earlier about it being a real compliment whenever someone buys a Lowercase shirt or product.

Phil:
yeah well I'm glad things are going so well for you at the moment, so other than you're life what influences you're art work? I mean you've got a ver discint style that always amazes me everytime I look at it.

Michael:
Thanks man, i've allways enjoyed art that has obviously has had alot of time and effort put into it. I remember when i was a kid looking at the "wheres wally" books and being amazed at the complexity of it. Also i like to challenge myself with that style, its almost me Vs the paper, finding ways to interlink the seperate parts into one big piece, its kind of like having a big mind-poo. Thats just one style though, and as much as i love drawing in that style, i do like to explore other techniques. I do love the simplicity and pureness of flat colour and you'll see that in most things i do, which is handy because doing work using flat colour translates well to screen printing i dont really set myself any rigid rules or anything, sometimes i have a definate idea of what i want, other times i'll just start something and see where it goes.

Phil:
As much as I love that style I really love you're other designs like cross off, its even better on a tee, so do you think you're styles going to change over time?

Michael:
Of course it will, i look back at my stuff from 3 years ago and its alot different to what it is now, thats why i love doing what i do, it constantly evolves. It exites me wondering what my next piece of work will be like, and that motivates me to keep making stuff. I do go through stages where i'm not very inspired which is REALLY frustrating but it allways passes.

Phil:
kind of like writers block

Michael:
yeah, i think everyone gets it. I'm hoping that i'll be able to focus on doing my own thing full time soon, i do all this whilst coming home from a day job and that exhausts you alot of the time. if this stuff could be my sole focus, then that would be the icing on the cake really.

Phil:
Well I wish you the best of luck with it, so what do you do with you're free time when you're not working or doing lowercase?

Michael:
if i'm honest it doesnt leave too much free time. I do like the quiet life nowadays and i cant think of anything better than to kick back with my girlfriend and my cat and just relax and watch a film or something like that. I saw a film the other week called "Me and You and Everyone We Know" which was amazing. films like that inspire me to create things.

title="Photo Sharing" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/94591025@N00/389714877/">

Phil:
ok final question, what would you do if ninjas stole you're bike?

Michael:
i'd go and find their parents and get them proper done.

Phil:

Thanks for the interview mate, it was a pleasure talking to you.

You can go check out Mikes work over at:

michael-latimer.com

You can go buy lowercase clothing at:

lowercase industry

And you can buy prints at:
archipelago gallery sheffield

fotographia

Our first new interview! stinger!

From the first time I saw Jan a.k.a stingers work I knew that I loved it and would be a fan forever, recently I got the chance to interview Jan. Enjoy.


Phil

So Jan, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jan

Well the basics then:
- Jan Willem Wennekes
- I live in Groningen, The Netherlands
- My education: MA in Philosophy and MA in Artificial Intelligence
- Just finished university and am about to either get a job or try the
freelance life.

Phil

Cool, so how did you get into art?

Jan

How did I get into art, wow. Hard to remember. I think I have been
drawing as long as I can remember, and I've done art in high school too
for a while. But I was quite interested in the sciences and dropped
that subject to take on other courses. When I went to uni I started to
do designs for the first time digitally - one of the first things I
made was actually a logo meant for clothing company. When I finally got into
illustrator I really got hooked on the program and probably that's
when things started rolling for real. Before that I used my computer
for other stuff like gaming and whatnot, but after that, I haven't
touched a game since!



Phil

Yeah its funny, quite a few designers choose to take other routes before deciding on design, Oliver Moss, I think is taking a BA in English, nothing to do with art, so how did you end up doing Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence?

Jan

Yeah I heard that from Olly himself - he has no idea what to do with
it, but obviously doesn't need his degree either, haha!

My interest for AI has been an ongoing thing from high school, I've
always been interested in cognition, the brain, intelligence, human
beings and animals, language and those kind of things. Of course the
question rises as to what intelligence exactly is, and if you can
fake/build it. I was lucky enough to have Philosophy as a subject in
high school which introduced me to these type of topics. When I was
doing AI I had to do a fair amount of Philosophical courses too, and
those got me interested in Philosophy for its own sake. So when I
finished AI, I still really had a thing going for Philosophy
(especially for the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein). I did, however, get
a job offer as a consultant/web designer and followed up on that first.
But after a while, I started to feel a vibe again for Philosophy and decided to quite my job and go back to uni. Quite a heavy decision, but I haven't regretted it a single day. It's kind of hard to describe Wittgenstein's philosophy, but I really think that he was a brilliant philosopher and with his philosophy it was like it was with designing: once I got into it I couldn't let go of it anymore.



Phil

Wow, I mean going to uni for a first time is a daunting task (I'm off to uni in September) but going for a second time, well you're a braver man than me, I think dunno havent done the whole uni thing yet so who knows. So do you think AI and Philosophy have had an influence on you're art work? and what are you're other influences I mean you've got a really distinct style.


Jan

Yes, I think that both subjects have had -
and still have - influence over my work. If not directly by their
content, then maybe in a contrasting kind of way: maybe I sometimes
try to counter the complexity of things in my studies with simplicity
in artwork? But at the same time problems in AI or Philosophy have a
way of ending up to be fairly simple and can often be solved with very limited means, so to say. Also, in AI I really like the combination of different subjects (such as psychology, math, linguistics, biology, robotics, etc) - it's kind of refreshing and multi-facetted. And in Philosophy I really like the way of thinking, of analysing problems and finding the deeper idea behind them. I think I can say that in some way my artwork and my studies are all sort of clean and analytical, at least to me it feels as if they are all connected somehow. Another thing is that attending lectures and reading books can be a great time to do some doodling, ha-ha :)

Other influences include a lot of artists, I’m actually daily inspired by looking at shirts people are wearing, and I somehow just love t-shirt graphics and the (often) limited use of colours. Limitations can be a great pushing factor in creativity. I also have a thing for street art and stencilling, and a lot of famous street artists do graphic design as well (for example, 123klan, flying fortress, Buffmonster, Dave the chimp, Bansky, Dave Warnke, the London police, and many many more). It's very refreshing!




Phil

Yeah I mean one of the distinct aspects of you're art work is that its so simple and yet there always seems to be a sort of story behind it, instead of a simple this looks pretty factor (though that’s always nice), so before you mentioned you're design company, zeptonn could you tell us a little bit about that? How it came about?


Jan

Thanks man! I really do try to make things simple in some way, but it
can be quite a process to actually get that right. I think it's all in the details really: a slight change in a line, or the position of e.g. an eye can make a big difference in the end. So i'm fiddling with those things a lot when I make a piece.

About Zeptonn: this started out as a small project in the beginning aimed at doing some graphic design work, but it went towards shirt-graphics pretty soon. I started it in 2001 and around 2 years later I had a skateboarding team (with 5 members) that I sponsored with clothing and Zeptonn Clothing was available throughout the Netherlands, in around 25 different shops. While that was very nice and cool, the distribution, sales, administration and industry seasons got in the way a bit: in the end I was doing mostly those kind of things, and not so much designing. It took me a while to realise but in the end I figured that I started the clothing business out of a need to design, so I decided to turn the whole thing around and stick to the designing only. A hard decision, but definitely the right one for me. I'm very happy with it now! So from a(skate)boarding clothing brand Zeptonn, has become a one-man design army!




Phil

So what are you’re plans for the future?


Jan

Plans for the future? Well, I'm currently working hard to start a freelance career and I'm trying to obtain some nice commissions that allow me to really do the stuff I like best, illustrations, monsters, stuff like that. But of course you never know what the future holds for you, so I'll have to see what happens and go along with what the world offers me! Also, with a couple of designers we're currently making a book with t-shirt designs, which is very exciting. This book is planned to come out at the end of this year so stay posted!


Phil

Well I look forward to the book mate, so what have you been listening to lately?

The stuff in my player right now is the following: Snow Patrol, Anthony Rother, Basement Jaxx, Morcheeba, Gorillaz, Jack Johnson, Moloko, C-Mon & Kypsi, Hooverphonic, Paris Derniere, Nouvelle Vague, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Les Rythmes Digitales... phew yeah I know, that's a lot, but generally I like to switch over to different types of music during the day. Anyway, there's more for sure but this is my current list



Phil

Cant beat a bit of Jack Johnson every now and again, right now I'm obsessed with a Japanese band called the Polysics, its a sort of crazy mix between techno and new wave, its difficult to describe because I've never heard anything quite like it, but its so damn addictive.

So what’s the population of Netherlands?

Jan

16,299,000 (we're pretty densely populated, I believe somewhere in the top 25 of most densely populated countries).

Phil

And finally is there anything you'd really like to say?

Jan

I don't think there's much left to say other than: keep up the good work and keep up the good spirit!

Phil

Cheers mate and thanks for the chance to interview you, you can see more of Jans stuff over at:zeptonn