Joel Washington Part I: Movies, Music, and Influences

Bloomington painter Joel Washington has been drawing and painting since he was a teenager. His aggressive use of color and pop art stylings have made him one of Bloomington's most recognizable artists. Last year, Joel was mentioned in the Washington Post as a notable artist in the Bloomington area, and celebrated his 50th birthday with a show at the Showers Plaza downtown. His work has been shown locally, nationally, and internationally in venues such as the Indiana University Memorial Union, Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center, the Indiana State Museum, and the US Embassy in Bangkok. His work is currently on display at the Indiana Governor's Office.

Around town, you can purchase his work and his Lab Ratical line of skateboards at Laughing Planet Cafe, Amused Clothing, and Rhett Skateboarding.You can contact Joel through www.joelwashingtonart.com. To coincide with the interviews in this blog, ReFrame has started an "Artist of the Week" discount. This week, if you bring any Joel Washington piece (original or print) to be framed, you'll receive 10% off the job!

In Part I of the interview, we discuss his earliest influences and his love of film and animation. In Part II, available here, we discuss his current projects and the public reception of his work, as well as his plans for the future.

What are your major influences?

I like a lot of pop art. Contemporary stuff. My influences are the obvious ones, like Warhol and Peter Max. Oh, Peter Max, he's very big in pop art from the sixties, but he's still doing stuff today. His work is unmistakable. He's one of those people that when you go and see his stuff, it automatically hits you. His use of color, along with Warhol's and many others' inspire my work.

But what really kick started me in terms of all of that was the movie Yellow Submarine. I saw it when I was 11 years old. It's funny 'cause a long time ago this friend of mine had given my family these old albums, and there was a soundtrack to Yellow Submarine. I used to look at the album cover, because it had the characters on it, while listening to the music. I never thought that I would ever see the movie, so I used to listen to the record and imagine what scene was what.

One time, when we lived in Indianapolis, on Saturday morning I was looking at TV and on CBS, you know how they always say 'television premiere' or whatever, and there it was, Yellow Submarine. The thing is, my mom and dad were divorced. And when we were young, we lived with my mom and my dad picked us up on Sunday. And the show was coming on CBS on Sunday night. So when our dad came to pick us up, I played sick because I knew if I went with him and my brother and sisters, even if we had the TV on, there was no way to focus and I wouldn't get to watch it. So I played sick and had the little TV all to myself. My mom was at church for evening service, so I had the whole TV to myself and got to watch it uninterrupted, and was just hooked on it. And from that moment on I would just try to draw the characters or come up with my own characters. But I always played with color. That movie is still a textbook for me. I still see stuff in it that I didn't catch the time before, that movie just has a lot in it. A lot of people thought that Peter Max did the artwork for it because his work looks very much like the art in the movie, but it's actually a German artist named Heinz Edelmann who did it, but they both had similar styles. I love that movie badly. Still today, it's my favorite animated film.

So you're a big animation fan. Does a lot of your love of color and painting come from watching animation?

Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to be an animator before a painter, and I just kind of fell into the painting thing. I would still like to finish the animated film I've been working on myself. It's a 5-minute experimental thing that I did just to see if I could animate period. There's no real plot or anything to it, but it's at least 5-minutes long and there are 1400 drawings. I've got to finish coloring them up, but I'd at least like to do a test reel of it. Even though it might not be finished, I'd still like to see how it pans out. Also, with the all the stuff you can do in computers with drawings and animation, I'd like to take it up a notch now. I love animation.

Animation seems to be the thing that inspired you to get into art. What are some of the things that keep you going as an artist now?

Just the whole pop art scene from the sixties. I collect a lot of documentaries on pop art and just art in general. Biopics, movies based on famous artists. Basquiat being one of them. I've got six or seven Warhol documentaries. There's a lot of them out there.

If you could pick five movies for an artist to watch, what would they be?

Five? The first one I would pick would be a documentary from A&E called The Impressionists. It talks about the whole movement, the friendships between the people that started it. The things that led to some of them not being friends. What they went through as a group to be accepted by the art world. It's amazing. That'd be the first one. Second, any Andy Warhol documentary. In particular the one that PBS aired in their American Masters series. The Radiant Child, the new one about Basquiat. Another one would be The Universe of Keith Haring, it's a good one. There's a new one out called Exit through the Gift Shop. That's a pretty heavy one. If there were a sixth, there's one called The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale. That one is pretty intense. It starts off with him actually being drunk in front of the camera while his wife is filming it, and he's frustrated over his art sales, and he's throwing tantrums. It's kind of a bitter movie, but it's a really good movie. And the documentary probably put his artwork back on the rise finally.

I like documentaries that really show the pains and struggles that an artist goes through. Not all of them go through it as intensely, and you don't want it that way to progress or to make it, but some times that's just the hard life of it. And some still struggle even after they make it. Financially, they might not be struggling, but there's still that matter of acceptance. Sometimes it's like being a musician, where you've made this album that people like, but you don't know what your next move is. Sometimes your next best move is simply being yourself. Don't try to top yourself with something, sometimes you just have to be who you are whether it's accepted or not. The main thing is that it's got to be accepted by you, because it begins with you and ends with you. If other people want to come along for the ride, that's great if they want to enjoy it as much as you enjoy it. You try so hard to do something, you lose sight of the fact that you've got to have a life as well. I'm telling the truth here. One animated film for me that I look at as one of the most important for me as a lesson is a movie called American Pop. It's a movie that clearly says go after your dream, but don't lose yourself along the way. That's what the movie told me. There's going to be struggle, but you don't have to struggle that hard if you don't lose the things that bring you happiness. There's got to be a balance.

What about music influences?

Music follows me through all of this. When I'm painting, it's movies or music on all the time. Whenever I paint with nothing on, it just gets too quiet. Too quiet. One thing I used to do, if I was painting a musical celebrity, I used to play their music so I could try to capture that same essence in color through my own interpretation on canvas. But I found that sometimes I have to mix it up a bit. I can play jazz at one moment, but to get the colors right and the real feel of it, I have to switch to psychedelic music. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. I could be painting Trey Anastasio from Phish, but I'll be listening to Sgt. Pepper.

It sounds like you've got different kinds of music you use for different purposes in your art; to inspired different things, to hit a certain mood?

I do. Absolutely. Jazz, psychedelic, prog rock, all of these get me going in different ways.

In Part II, available here, we discuss his current projects and the public reception of his work, as well as his plans for the future.