Interview with JIM LUCIO

q)Walk us through an intimate day in your life

a)A great day will be me getting up at about 6:30am.  The house is always quiet at that time, so I can get some writing done or work on some stuff for the homoarts.com website.

I love to cook, so a good day would include planning and preparing a nice meal that I am hopefully sharing with a few friends--and opening a few bottles of wine.  I also usually try to spend some time in my studio working on my collages.

q) Where did you grow up/where do you live now and how does that contribute to your art?

a)I grew up in Salinas, California which is very close to Monterey and 100 miles south of San Francisco. I’ve spent just about the same amount of years in San Francisco, New York City and now Baltimore; I guess I am inspired by my own movement. The idea of staying in one place too long bores me and I start getting a bit agitated.  Baltimore has contributed more to my overall creativity because there are fewer distractions than larger cities and less of a rat race experience which leaves more time to think about being creative.

q) What is your earliest memory that propelled you to create?

a)I don’t know that this inspired me to create, but I remember as a very young child, looking at a photo of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and being totally confused and mesmerized by it. I didn’t understand it, but I think I liked it…I couldn’t stop looking at it.  I guess the easy answer is that I always preferred art class to anything else and spent a lot of time drawing, which I never do now.

q) Tell us a little bit about your creative process.

a)As it relates to the collage work I’ve been doing for the last couple of years, it’s been a really rewarding experience to step away from digital design and go completely analog and handmade.

Over the years, I have amassed a pretty large collection of old paper, magazines and various bits of ephemera, so what I typically do is sit at my work table and almost randomly pull something from one of the piles of paper around me and just wait to get inspired by something.  From there it becomes more about finding the right components to add to what I’ve started.  Sometimes things come together quickly and other times it will take hours to find the right little scrap of paper to finish a piece off.

I also start pieces and set them aside until I see a use for incorporating them into something later.  I have a whole bunch of piles and small boxes of half ideas that I can pull from and use when the need arises.  It really is like a puzzle sometimes to make everything fit the way you want it to.

q) How do you wish for your art to be perceived?

a)I look at what I do as my own visual language—like each collage is its own marketing piece. I like to say that I consume and regurgitate everything I take in visually. I translate what I already find in print and turn it into a product or design that is much more appealing to me in its new form.

So, I hope people can see and appreciate the language I am putting forth and enjoy this aesthetic as uniquely my own.

q) What do your internal dialogues sound like?

a)I wish my dog would make me some coffee. I am sick of winter.  What new projects can I start?  What can I make for dinner? I need to update my website and make art.  It’s a continuous cycle of what…where…how…who.

q) Do you feel that there are limitations to what you want to create?

a)Not at all. Currently I am working a lot on my collage work, but my creative output includes photography and events.  I co-ran a gallery in Baltimore for a while and worked as a visual arts director doing major outdoor installations with other artists.  I want to take www.homoarts.com more into the realm of publishing and events and I love collaborating with other artists, so that pretty much leaves all possibilities on the table.

q) Do you feel art is vital to survival and if so, why?

a)It’s vital to MY survival..that’s for sure. It’s just something I need to do. I love helping other artists…promoting their work, talking about it and whatnot, but I also need to produce my own because it’s the pure thing I can offer that is just from me without anyone else fussing over it. It allows me to really ‘check out’… when I am making art it’s the closest I can get to feeling in a zen place. I suck at meditating and this is as close as I can get to it.

q) Describe a world without art.

a)It is joyless. It is not being allowed to creatively thrive when you have something worthwhile to offer. It is soul-crushing to those who need to create and are somehow deprived of it. And for those who say they don’t appreciate it, their worlds would suck if they couldn’t reap the rewards provided by artists.

q) Tell us a secret, and obsession.

a)A secret…for as sociable as I can be, I often prefer to be alone.

I am currently obsessed with reality cooking shows, homoarts.com and getting through all 692 episodes of Prisoner: Cell Block H…they’re all streaming online and I am currently on episode 133!

q) Where can people see more of your work on the internet?

a)www.defekto.com

www.homoarts.com is where you can find my work, artist interviews, etc.

Flickr: www.flickr.com/defekto/