originally published in print in the Peanut Butter Sandwich Program issue#10, 2014
JJ: You grew up in the Bay area. How did you get into painting?
ZZ: I grew up in Mill Valley, where we are right now, really close to here. I used to design hats and T-shirts. It started with writing girls’ names in 5th grade. I wanted to get these cute girls to like me and so I’d write their names in graffiti letters and I’d give them…I mean that was the real first interactive art that I did. Before that I always drew, I always painted. My dad’s a writer and my mom’s an artist, so, I was always surrounded by this idea of constant creation. I grew up building forts, painting cardboard houses, and drawing with chalk in the street and our driveway. It was very habitual. After that, it was drawing girls’ names. Some of these girls I know still. They still have it. It’s amazing. I would stay up all night, blow off my homework and draw graffiti on paper—like cool black book stuff—and leave it on the kitchen counter for my parents to look at in the morning. But it was every night; there was a new piece, new piece, new piece. I would go on these…back when it was two minutes to download an image or something like that off the internet, I would print out all the graffiti I saw on the internet and I’d put it on the walls around my bedroom—the ceiling, the walls, everything. That was what excited me.
What I started to do after is that I started to draw on the blank Hanes t-shirts for my friends, drawing bands, drawing hats, just with Sharpies and paint pens. I wanted to connect people together.
I liked the idea that people were wearing and using my art.
It was like a different way of getting up, I guess. I used to ride my bike into the city and watch these guys, watch the pieces go up at night. Sometimes I’d find where that was happening and look at new art and sometimes, catch a tag here or there but I was never a graffiti writer, by any means. I tried and I wasn’t too successful. I always liked this way of looking and trying to understand what the piece said, all this kind of hidden, the ploy aspect of the graffiti painting. That’s how I learned light, depth, shadow, color, and line, was from graffiti and from comic books. I grew up copying those pieces--certain letters from certain guys--copying characters. I was so inspired by a lot of the Bay Area graffiti artists and the global ones that I think; it’s what kind of formed the foundation of everything.
I started doing silk-screening. I don’t think I painted a canvas until I was 17. It was all drawings. It was all stickers. It was all hats, everything besides canvases because I didn’t like this idea of being an artist where one person could see it in a gallery or a fraction of the people. It was so limiting. I really got into it that way. Then I went to art school and the first day, they ask you who are your favorite artists and I listed all these graffiti writers and skateboard designers and everyone was like, “what”? Everyone was saying, “I like Matisse. I like Caravaggio.” I was like, “Who is that?” And so then I became obsessed with art history. I wanted to paint like Caravaggio. I wanted to have the freedom of brushwork that Klimt had. I wanted that, you know? But, I found it so hard to break away from filling the canvas as though it were a wall. Even these first canvasses that I had were so valuable for me because it was the surface that I had saved up for that I had to fill the whole thing. It was like, if I wasn’t filling the whole canvas, it wasn’t worth it. It was crazy. Paintings are filled with so many hidden symbols and line and a lot of text. The people that were looking at my work then in school absolutely hated it. It was so rejected. They were like, “What the fuck are you doing? This is terrible work.” It was ignored. It would sit on the critique wall and it was ignored. Sometimes people would interpret it and it wasn’t linear enough so they’d be like, “What does this skull symbolize? What does this tiger symbolize? What is this figure? Why is it in this color?” I was like, “Why does it matter? I’m just painting from my mind. I don’t have to justify everything.”
So the issue then was…I’m a sensitive guy. I was trying to safeguard myself against my painting getting ripped apart in critiques, so I started to hide symbols in plain sight. So you’d look at a painting and it would look like a whole bunch of pattern and line and then you’d see a skull, and then you’d see the skull go away because you couldn’t see it. It was like looking at the clouds. It was a whole bunch of things hidden in plain sight, in the same way that I couldn’t read the graffiti pieces. It would take them longer to find and interpret all the symbols. Then my critique would be over. And I’d be like, “You didn’t find everything so if you don’t have the whole picture, you can’t analyze it so fuck you.” You know? It was like a defense mechanism.
And then I was like, “All right. Now I want to paint in realism. I want to show them that I can play their game.” So I painted in realism for a long time. I painted from life and from photo and from shadow. I took anatomy classes. I studied the figure. I studied depth and perspective, color theory, and all that. It felt so foreign to me. It felt like I was doing something for someone else. I was like, I’m never someone that wants to be mediocre. I’m super competitive. If I wanted to do something, I wanted to be the absolute best at it. That’s very hard in art because it’s subjective. But there is…you look at the greats. Some of them just, A, didn’t care, or B, they built their legend so that they could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. So I had this realization; I think I was reading a book about Picasso’s life at the time. I’d read audiobooks while I’d paint—listen to them. I read this thing and I took all my paintings and I threw them out the window, my realistic paintings, 4th floor, illustration studios, into the dumpster, months of work. I said, “This is not me. I’m not going to be remembered for something I was doing for someone else. And I’m not doing this to be someone that makes my professors happy. I never made my professors happy.”
JJ: Where was this? Where did you go to school?
ZZ: Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Before that, I went to high school…I was kicked out of my high school art program. I had to do theater instead because that was the alternative. In middle school when I did art, the teacher gave up and said, “All right. Here’s a pen. Don’t bother anyone else, just draw on the tables.” I’d kind of sneak into the screen-printing studios and I’d print my shirts in college. I would do this and I didn’t really fit anywhere. I tried to apply for a residency once over the summer and they…”Are you joking? Your work sucks.” The school, the institution just didn’t like it so I was like, “You know what? I just have this outsider sort of spirit, and I affirmed it.”
JJ: And it didn’t deter you either.
ZZ: It hurt. You know. But I was like, “Thank God.” I look back at that—that that happened. If I had been accepted or affirmed or if they’d liked it, I don’t think I would have any reason to paint differently than the majority of people on the planet.
JJ: I’m a big supporter of the struggle feeding the creative. I think there is definitely something to that.
ZZ: Yeah, I agree man. I think it’s also the passion and the struggle. It’s like what you stay up all night thinking about. It’s not working for a class. It’s not working for a boss. It’s not working for some idea that isn’t yours. It’s like working for you. I got a C- in entrepreneurship when I was opening these pop-up stores for my t-shirts and clothing. I was in an entrepreneurship class. I thought this is perfect; I’m going to take this. I took the class and I said, “Here’s what I’m going to do for my project.” Everyone else was doing hypothetical projects. I was like, “I’ve saved all this money. I’ve printed these hundreds of shirts in the print-making lab. I have nothing. I’m renting a space and I’m going to do this.” And the guy said, “No, you’re not. Not for my class.” I said, “This is an art entrepreneurship class.” He said, “Hypothetically. You can’t actually do a real-life project for entrepreneurship.” So, I actually said, “Okay. All right, bro. it’s now hypothetical.” And he knew. This guy and I looked at each other and it was like, I just wanted to win. It’s just an alpha sort of instinct, the same with cycling or snowboarding. It’s sitting in the park all day. It’s sitting next to the dirt jumps all day and trying to land that trick. No one’s actually saying that they’re competing but the first one that lands that trick…it’s the same thing with my professors. It was the same thing…I just wanted to win.
I got the grade two weeks into my store that I had. It was my paintings. It was about making art accessible. I had open nights where people could talk about their work and I had little shows. It was like everything was hand-printed. My paintings were on the walls. I was a junior in college and then my report card came in and I framed it and put it up. I had great grades, except for one C- from this guy. And that guy…those people that I can really, really thank for being as rude as they were, and for being as strictly inside of their own box, because I’m not cut out for anything besides what I’m cut out for. So after I threw all these realistic paintings away, I was just like, “What’s me?” What’s this voice? What’s the distinctness? What did Van Gogh draw before he knew how to draw? What’s the Gauguin sort of line or the Francis Bacon kind of boldness? What is that? What is that inside of me? And I just went back to pattern and line and drawing the figure in a way that was so easy. It was like the path of least resistance. If you look at my figures, they are amalgamations of mistakes and attempts and fractured sort of expectations and internal anatomy. It’s not how things look, it’s how things feel. That’s how I want to paint too.
JJ: You have created an enormous amount of work over the last year. It’s so detailed and often on such a large scale. It seems to me that that would take a lot of time. How do you get this done? Do you ever sleep?
ZZ: I kind of have put art before life for the last couple of years. This girlfriend that broke up with me and moved back to New York, like kind of set the fire under my ass, in a way, because I was like, “Well if she’s gonna go lead a normal life and my paintings are working, I’m going to prove her wrong.” It was kind of like Dumont—kind of Monte Christo.” It wasn’t as much to prove her wrong as much as it was just to prove to myself that I could do it.
JJ: It seems like you have a very strong, competitive thing going there.
ZZ: Very strong. I’m my own worst critic. I’m also my own best advocate but I need to contradict myself all the time. So if something goes extraordinarily well, I’m the first one to destroy that thing. If something is going very, very bad, I’m the first one to confront that and fix it. So painting, I think, has worked for me in the last couple of years because there was no expectation. No one wanted the canvases. I could make whatever I wanted. I was living in the woods. Who’s looking? I think when you live in a city you become more conscious of what’s happening. You become aware of that Faustian compromise of like, if I paint in this certain way, I can become popular and make money and have a bigger house to live in to paint these paintings that I’m compromising with.
I said, “Fuck that.” I want to ride my bike. I want to live in nature and I want to make something from my core. I’m not painting for anyone else. I already went through that. You have to learn from that and so…
JJ: That’s a good position to be in.
ZZ: But I still…it’s like, she left. When she left, I moved back into my parent’s house. I was like 22 and all my friends are working these jobs and they had the cool lifestyle and I was like, “I have to paint.” I love my parents. They’re wonderful, but I was like, the painting came first. Like you said earlier when people ask you if they want to go into whatever it is, photography. You check yourself. You know? You look at yourself. That was the moment where I was like, Okay. I can go get a job and like you said, sit in front of the computer all day and think about what could have been, or, I can just do it. But if I do it, I have to do it authentically.
JJ: You have to commit.
ZZ: And so I just committed fully. I mean, it’s like pulling a backflip on a snowboard or a bike. You have to stick your head all the way. You can’t stick it halfway. You stick it halfway; you’re not going to rotate through.
JJ: You’re dropping into a big wave.
ZZ: You have to commit fully.
JJ: Right.
ZZ: Art is the same thing, man. It’s dropping in with the full force and so, I was there and just didn’t let myself stop working. I was drawing during dinner, I was painting 18 hours a day. You tell me you have a wall. Everything went wrong. I paint my first commission and the woman doesn’t pay me my money for the painting—the commission. She says, “You can paint the white walls in here.” So I said, “Okay.” I painted all the white walls and I started to like…, “Whoa.” I only had a can of black spray paint. I started to sort of figure this out. Some guy comes by in a car and he says, come paint my house. I said, “Are you kidding? I don’t want to destroy your wall.” He says, “Come tomorrow.” So I go to his house but I didn’t have enough room on my bike to fit the colors. So I was riding my bike over there and brought black so I just did black line on a wall and kind of made it up. Then the next day, his friend says, “You know, I’ve got a gallery in L.A,” and the gallery cheats me out of the money. But I have a show and someone sees that show. Every negative experience has something positive. It’s just about persevering and being like, “Well…the rest…everything can go…”
JJ: Plus, I think making the mistake is a good thing. You really learn from your mistakes. I think that’s an important thing to do. Committing to it, you run into…you drop in a big wave, there will be times when you will crash but you’ll learn from it. It’s like what I said about the cameras. If you press the button and every time it’s $2.00 and it’s crap, you learn from it really quickly.
ZZ: Entirely. You have to commit to it. You have to pursue that, otherwise…you can’t half-push through it, so I think that was the real fundamental goal was to be the greatest artist of my time, without really competing with anyone else. I’d set that in front of me, like a carrot, and chase it. If you say, I want to be the greatest artist of my time, you can’t stop working. You can’t stop evolving. You can’t stop pursuing that. It’s not egotism. It’s not arrogance. It’s a fire under your ass. It’s the ex-girlfriend leaving every day and being like, “Good luck.” The world responds to authenticity. That’s my core belief. It responds to what is good and what is right. Things have a way of self-correcting and gravitating towards that.
JJ: If you stick to that, usually, you weasel your way through it.
ZZ: Yeah.
JJ: What have been some favorite commission projects of yours?
ZZ: It’s been wonderful to work with Vans. I mean, that’s been…painting the U.S. Open Bowl was super fun. Painting a McLaren was really a fun one. That was interesting. All these things have… we talk about mistakes and anomalies like everything will go wrong and my favorite ones are where I can adapt from that mistake and create an opportunity. The Chinese say crisis and opportunity are the same thing. I very much so believe that. It’s about bringing yourself so close to crisis where you can… As humans, we’re built to adapt and evolve. We don’t put ourselves in positions with the complacency in our society anymore to do that. But if you live on the fringe, you make these mistakes and take these huge risks. You have to. You will find a way. Your mind is built to build new pathways and to forage new things and push the frontier. That’s my favorite commission is always the one that I can do that with.
One of my favorite stories, I said yes to this wall in downtown Las Vegas—the first of two walls. I was like, “It’s 35 by 35 feet. Maybe 40 by 40 feet”, and they were like, “How long do you need?” I said, “One day.” I flew in very late and went to sleep for a couple of hours. I woke up at 5:00 and painted from 5:00 a.m. to 3 a.m. the next day, straight through. Eating, painting, so many mistakes. So many adaptations. I was burning in the sun. I was reading this book on tape and the piece is one of my favorite pieces because I didn’t have time to think about anything besides just getting it done. The clock was ticking. It was like the race I prepared for this moment but I hadn’t prepared a sketch. I never do sketches. I just make it up from there.
JJ: So, would you say that you kind of zone in? When you work, you really zone in?
ZZ: Yeah. I build a vacuum in my mind and I just focus.
JJ: Meditative kind of?
ZZ: Entirely. There’s no pre-conception of what the painting is. If someone says, you have to paint a bear or you have to paint a figure in this way, I quit because I can’t do that. Or I tell them, “Yeah, yeah, for sure.” And I just don’t do it. I have to have the ability to adapt and change on the fly. When you’re in that zone, you’re the only one who knows that that hand is too big or it’s not balanced. And then the piece starts to crave things from you. And the piece is like, it almost speaks to you. You can stand back and no one else can see this but you know that it needs a little more black and a little more thing. It’s instinct. That’s what I want to paint with is just instinct all the time, one line and then all of the sudden another line feels right and then you’re like, “I’m going to take a risk I’m going to put a bike here.” Whatever, and then the bike doesn’t fit so the bike turns into a head. Then the head doesn’t fit so you add another face in front of it. Then the face doesn’t fit…the face is too big so the arm needs to be bigger. You look at my pieces, the lines they grow. They evolve. There’s no way I could have planned any of the good ones.
JJ: I think that’s where things happen when you zone in and get lost in the creative process.
ZZ: For sure.
JJ: Do you have a dream project?
ZZ: I think the dream project, right now, is to paint the atrium in MOMA New York.
JJ: Uh huh.
ZZ: I had a woman here from MOMA the other day and I just said to her, same way I started to work with Vans, I met one of the sales reps. I said, “I want to do something for Vans,” and he’s like, “Okay.” He emailed me and the creative director who is now one of my great friends, the guy who runs it, Russ Pope. Russ said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I just started asking for stuff.
JJ: I feel like it’s the funniest thing. There was a gallery that I showed something in and the gallery director asked a curator friend of mine, “How does he get these things? How does he do this stuff?”
ZZ: Yeah.
JJ: And my friend the curator said, “You know what, I think he just asks.”
ZZ: People are scared to ask.
JJ: If you just ask and you’re honest about it, usually things happen.
ZZ: Yeah, I agree, because we’re all just human, at the end of the day. I think the funny thing is I’m doing this project right now with Pottery Barn and the only reason I did that was I thought, what a cool new challenge, to design sheets and bedding. To put my stamp…like kids share it in their bedrooms. That’s pretty cool. That’s fun. Some girls said to me the other day when I was on the Pottery Barn shoot, “Oh my God, you just called my boss a dude.” I was like, “Well, yeah, he’s just like a dude. He’s just like a human.”
JJ: It’s not like he’s not.
ZZ: He’s just a dude! And the fucking second you start thinking he’s more than a dude, that’s the second that you start becoming scared and having preconceptions. It’s all expectations that destroy everything. It’s too quantitative. People want things from one another. They want success or they want money or they want something. The second you throw all of that out the window and your interactions are, in essence, are just following objective circumstances, responding—there’s residence or there’s not. So I’m going to call everyone dude and then just ask them for the things that I should not ask for, you know? That’s the difference between having to compromise and take a different job or making my painting work. It’s just being audacious and believing that I have some sort of very small chance at being great at this. It’s every moment you see an opportunity, you have to take that. Even if the opportunity goes totally wrong, you take that. So yeah, the last year has been crazy because I never thought any of these opportunities would actually come to be. I’m always shocked still when the phone call comes in.
JJ: I think that’s the right way. You know?
ZZ: It’s about being like, just go for it.
JJ: Are all of your outdoor pieces commissioned or do you also do non-permitted stuff like street art or graffiti style where you do walls that are not necessarily commissioned?
ZZ: I have a new approach to that. I think it’s a new approach. I wear a collared shirt. I show up to a wall that I want to paint on a Sunday or on a day when most people are just lounging around and the business owners are gone. I make sure it’s a temporary surface that’s ugly or scarred and I just start painting. Then, if someone asks me, I tell them I’m from such and such committee or that I got an email from such and such a person. I’ve said I’m with the San Francisco Public Beautification Committee. I started doing this in Hollywood. There was a major street, Cahuenga Blvd., and it was this empty façade on this empty building and I said, “I’m just going to go paint that in the middle of the day.” On the weekend, people were walking down the street, police are driving by. At night it’s graffiti and during the day, you just walk there and start painting. As long as it’s not letters and you don’t have gang tattoos, you look presentable or something…
JJ: It’s funny how there’s these preconceptions, right?
ZZ: Yeah.
JJ: You can actually…with the art, you can not only just create a piece of art, you can also play with the people’s preconceptions of what it means that there’s somebody painting a wall.
ZZ: Entirely. So that’s a big thing that I mess with. But a lot of the big pieces too, the ones you use lifts are often commissioned or they just say, “Yeah, you can paint my wall.” For the longest time, even now if I see a wall, the business owner says no and I have to convince him. I’ve probably got to pay for my own paint and my own lift. That used to be the case. It was like…but I think I’m this big believer if the work gets out there, it will just generate more work and so it’s just about keeping the ball rolling and keeping it more…you know, take every opportunity that feels right to you.
JJ: You are an avid cyclist. You haven’t talked about cycling too much but cycling has the kind of qualities to it that I can also find in your work: the rawness, the power, the chaos, the balance, the finesse and the boldness. Getting in the zone. What’s your connection between cycling and painting?
ZZ: Cycling is my main sport. It keeps me sane, I think in a main way. It shows me that the world is bigger than just the canvas. I go out there every day and I ride and it’s just like the things that mattered so much start to fall away and it’s just like nature and you’re trying to get up the hill a little bit faster or down the trail. And there’s a beautiful thing with cycling where you can’t think too far ahead. You have to face the challenges that are right in front of you. As soon as you’re riding your mountain bike and you’re thinking about the route that is way further down the trail, rather than the one in front of you, you crash.
I think that’s a great example for life—dealing with what’s right in front of you.
Dealing with objective circumstances. And as for the boldness and the power of cycling, I think that’s where my competitive spirit comes from. The greatest road or mountain and endurance cyclists, they’re not necessarily more fit. Everyone trains the same amount. They all ride the same amount. It’s just mind over matter. It’s how badly you want it. I think painting is the same thing. You look at…what’s the guy? He has a crazy…he used to ride the tour and race against Lance. He just drinks all winter and hops on the bike. You know who I’m talking about? Super slow cadence? He’s got that frame company? I can’t remember right now but he has the worst style but he’s so fast. He just did it his way and it worked and he just went for it.
JJ: Do you remember Shaun Palmer?
ZZ: Oh yeah, snowboarder and cyclist guy. Yeah.
JJ: He went down on a mountain bike and won the downhill. In his old Vans, in the mid 90’s where everyone was like, “What’s going on?” That was the same idea.
ZZ: I think the second that you take all the expectations out; it’s so much more fun. It’s so much more you.
JJ: You’re seeing outside the box a little bit too.
ZZ: Entirely, and just exist in your own way. Rather than training in the right way and doing this, it’s like…I have all these friends that train the right way. They try to compete with the guys who just want it more than them, and they can’t. It’s a matter of spirit, you know?
JJ: Correct. Did you grow up having access to the internet at a young age and if so, do you feel that you have a way of perceiving and acting in the world that is different from people who grew up analog?
ZZ: I grew up on the cusp. I mean, it was dial-up. My childhood; no internet until I was like in middle school maybe. Then you went on Ask Jeeves to find something, very early on. I’m so thankful that I didn’t grow up with too much connectivity. No cell phone until 8th grade. I mean none of this stuff. If you were late for a check-in when you were skiing with your parents, you were in trouble. I don’t know what’s going to become of the people that have everything right in front of them.
You and I talked earlier about false information. I think it’s quite scary to imagine a world where with a few… anyone can put information on the web that can be disseminated in a different way. Also, it can be ingrained in the fabric and end up on Wikipedia and a kid will source on Wikipedia and then for his paper, maybe that kid becomes a doctorate student and his thesis goes online and that’s false information. It’s this whole cycle where I don’t know. You start to run these ideas of trans-humanism and singularity and what’s going to happen with the computers, building computers. It’s kind of scary to think about. I am much more partial to just not really using my email, living close to the land. Sure, I mean there is amazing tools for promotion and whatnot, but, if you let it consume you, I think there’s a grand unhappiness that comes with it. I think we’re going to find out that the internet is kind of the same as consumerism, as it was in the 80’s. It doesn’t really make you happier. So I don’t let myself go on art blogs. I don’t really read my email, for the most part. I’ll post on Instagram because I like to share my photos with my friends and I think it’s a great way to catalog my art. But in terms of just looking at all the stuff that’s out there, there’s too much. There’s too much of these things…where’s the value? I don’t read the news. I don’t want to know what’s going on in the world. I just want to be present.
JJ: It’s like what you said earlier. When you ride a bike, you have to worry about what’s in front of you. It’s kind of the same thing. If you worry so much about something that’s happening at the other end of the world that you have zero influence over, you waste a lot of energy on something you can’t change.
ZZ: For sure. I think that’s the thing…
JJ: I think now we get bombarded with something, a minor incident that is happening somewhere else that is not really of importance to you and you start getting worried about it.
ZZ: I also think it’s crazy because it’s very easy to share your images with the world. There’s a dichotomy there.
I think there’s a paradigm shift towards relevance being built by those which are better at sharing their stuff, like their images.
The same way that Banksy made the film and overnight it became… no one in the pop world really knew about him, maybe here and there. Not that many people followed his work before then. I know one of his galleries in London, this guy named Deface, he said, “No one wanted to buy Banksy prints a couple of years ago. The film comes out, pop culture relevance becomes trendy, cool, and sharable and now everyone wants it. We’re all chasing these illusions. I just would rather really be quite meticulous with the ones I choose to chase and not really absorb myself in the phantom of the internet.
JJ: What are some words you would use to describe your state of mind?
ZZ: When painting or when…?
JJ: No. I think generally.
ZZ: I’d say I love “sprezzatura”, this Italian word. It embodies…it’s a canvas that has a soul in it. You can’t understand why but the alchemy of the paint, the whole life of the canvas took on its own life. I think that’s very interesting. I think if I have sprezzatura, that’s good. There’s a Greek word “kairos”. It’s intuition of the moment. Alexander the Great was a master of kairos, just as Napoléon was. He knew what to do when. The master of intuition of the moment. I think “bold”, hopefully.
JJ: We hit that one earlier. I think that’s a good one.
ZZ: Reflective. Hopefully, funny. A lot of people would disagree with me on that one. And just lighthearted and kind. That’s what I go for. But also I take my work very fucking seriously. It’s not a joke. I’m not making paintings to be ironic. I’m not doing this to be mediocre. This is my life. But I also love having friends that are like, “Oh yeah, whatever. You paint for a living. That’s like, ha-ha.” I need that. It keeps you humble.
JJ: It’s a good balance.
ZZ: It is a good balance and I think that another word would be hopefully just reflective. You know, just always pulling and reflecting and pouring out and just…it’s important to leave the valve open and be able to create. I think also contradiction is a huge part of my process. It’s like being comfortable with not being linear. Hating one thing one day and loving it the next and being okay with just oscillating, always growing maybe.
JJ: What do you believe is the position or duty of the artist in today’s society and world?
ZZ: Irving Stone, this author, wrote a book about Michelangelo, called Agony and Ecstasy. There was a quote where he says, “The role of the artist is to…pretty much on the 7th day after the world has been built, to reflect upon the built world as a whole.
I think the role of the artist today is to evolve the human species.
I think people are becoming more and more indulgent. That sounds crazy but they’re becoming more indulgent in the way that things are easier. They need their air conditioning, their phone; they need a job that makes enough money to take care of their needs to play World of Warcraft and whatever it is. It’s very easy to slide by. The hierarchy of needs is entirely collapsed. It’s not very hard to live now. This is from a very ignorant perspective, living in the Bay Area, but here, the quality of life is relatively high. Sorry for the rest of the world.
I think the fundamental role of the artist is to convince those that are scared of being themselves to embrace that fully. I think it’s to break down barriers between the sexes. The only next evolution is going to be an inward evolution. It’s said that mind…the mind every thought is a little bit of matter. I think, when I was a child, my parents and I drove to the snow and I said, “Snow! Snow! Snow! Snow!,” in the backseat. It was going to snow but I thought I made it snow because it started snowing. I think it’s to preserve that mindset for your whole life. I think it’s to find new ways to reflect on the human condition and on ourselves. To realize that we have an individualistic perspective and that’s valuable. That’s worth sharing. It’s not the homogenized perspective that we all want to make. It’s the one that we were born with. It’s like preserving this freshness and this spirit that the world tries to hammer out of us in these institutions, the same way they tried to kill it inside of me in school. It’s preserving that thing and being a role model for others to do the same and to remind them because I think that Heraclitus said that a man’s fate is determined by his character. I think that there is a sort of predestination to everything in the fact that fate is binary. It’s a willingness to live every day. It’s a willingness to engage in certain things and not others. It’s like William James talks a lot about context, our fundamental context, our inspiration, or this, our family life—whatever it is, right? That forms the decisions that we make in the world.
I think that as an artist, it’s always important to have your core values, yes, your core perspective, but to reinvent your context on a daily basis, to play with your fate in new ways by embracing your native naiveté. As Kant would say, “You are a priority. The knowledge for the self, you know? That’s all you have to share in the world. You can assimilate…you can try to influence things by being someone else besides you but the potency and the humanity that you can affect by just being yourself, that’s what matters. That’s what I think people respond to.
If you look at the work, I mean, I think I’ve been really lucky with people responding to my art because when you put something out that’s that vulnerable, it’s either like…you know, it’s the same as putting on a critique wall. It’s a critique wall for the world now. But, I think people respond to authenticity. They respond to, like you said, the struggle. They respond to this. The role of the artist is to remind those that it’s worth being authentic. It’s worth suffering a little bit by the kids that…there’s no popular. It’s just an illusion. There’s no here and now besides the here and now. There’s no cool except for what feels right. It’s collapsing these sumptuary laws and social boundaries and just being authentic and standing your ground as an artist because artists are the only people and philosophers. It’s like the philosopher king. You have to be the philosopher king. You can’t have a worldly…once you’re tied to worldly possessions, once you’re tied to something, it owns you. It’s like constantly evading that. Even success in painting, even expectations in art, it’s like people want products. People want what they can expect. But you can’t ever give that to them or else you’re failing in your duty to inspire the world to constantly evolve and progress. We’re just a microcosm, us artists, of this sort of evolutionary specimen.
I think a lot of the world, the institutions, the schools, the companies, they’re organisms—clearly. Organisms, when it comes down to it, they defend themselves. Everything that a company does is to defend itself or to evolve or grow. It’s organic. I think people have gotten so far away from this very fundamental idea that we’re just animals with this illusion of free will. You know? Our free will is determined by every decision we make and it’s weighted more and more one way.
I think the painter or the artist or the writer or whatever, or the free, creative individual, it’s his role to never let the world pull them in one place because they’re the ones out there showing that we have a chance.
JJ: I personally think that the position of the artist is one of the most important these days because of exactly what you just explained. That there’s been such a strong shift towards people just, you know, doing this without ever thinking. And what I said earlier about still versus motion where I believe in painting or a still photograph that you have to use your brain to have some type of reaction to it. I feel that’s why I like what I do because I feel I make people think. I make people use their brains; even if it’s something that is far from what I thought was going to be the reaction. They’re still using their brains to really have a thought process. And I think thought processes are super important.
ZZ: I agree.
JJ: What is important to you in life? A life wisdom you want to share.
ZZ: You know; it’s never being complacent. It’s never reflecting on what works. It’s always pushing it to the next and the next. Evolution is important, authenticity, it’s… What’s important to me is finding people that, you know, my dad once said to me, “Why do you want the people who don’t respect you to respect you?” And I think about a lot of the art world, I think about a lot of the things people do in order to be accepted. And I think a very important thing for me is just to only, truly care about the people that I respect. The rest of them—the ones that change with the wind—they’re always going to change with the wind, whether it’s in your favor or against you. It’s just to stick with those that have their foundation. They have their idea of the world and they have their value system and they have their strength. I’ve always been inspired by people that sit down at tables, and even when it’s controversial, say something. I was at this dinner the other night in Austin with a whole bunch of street artists. This guy sits down and he says, “I think street art is fucking stupid. I think the names and the aliases, it’s hilarious.” I said, “This is wonderful!” I started laughing. I was like, “No, you’re not supposed to say that.” I think this whole social stigma against going against the norm, I admire people that do that from an authentic place, not like Kameez Rebel, but people that really come and believe something fundamentally different.
JJ: Because it’s gotten hip to do that, right? You see when people are authentic about it and that’s refreshing.
ZZ: Yes, it is. You feel it, you know? It’s very important. It’s very important and those are the people that I admire. My core value in life is to follow objective circumstances and progress in my paintings. My goal is to be a great painter, a substantial one that can change the world with images that can affect anyone to be more human, you know? Just to respond to their inner humanity. I don’t have an intellectual goal with my painting. I have a goal of making images with art and creativity and making things that challenge me and in turn, challenge the world in the way that we think about things, to just not take the bite-sized portions of life that were kind of handed down. Like, oh yeah, here’s your education. Here’s this. If you want something, then pursue it in the fullest way. Make mistakes. Be bold. Just embrace air. Turn air into opportunity. It’s about being adaptive. We stop being human. We start being animals when we’re not adaptive. I think that free will…you have to prove your worth every day as a human—a real human. Sure, you can get in your car and go to work and not do anything about the job that you don’t like. Or sure, I can sit in my studio and I can make paintings that I don’t really think are from my soul, but that catches up with you. It’s corrosive. I think in order to be fresh and human, you have to evolve. It might not even happen until you’re 60 or 65. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes; he was 65. Or Michelangelo, he did his important work when he was 70. It’s about never being complacent.
JJ: I feel like the great thing about being an artist is that there is no retirement. I at least don’t see that. It’s constantly evolving. You don’t have this line that you’re working towards and then it’s like, oh, now I’m going to lay on the beach. That’s not what it is.
ZZ: I will never stop working. Hemingway has this wonderful story. I think it’s an archetypal story that a lot of people tell in different cultures, The Fisherman. Every day he wakes up and he goes fishing and he catches fish and he sells the fish at the market. He goes home and he feeds his family and plays his guitar on the porch of his house. The next day, he wakes up and it’s the same thing. He’s very happy. He meets the American businessman. The businessman says, “You’re doing this all wrong. What you have to do is you have to catch more fish, sell more fish, and then the next year, you buy another boat. You hire more fishermen. Then after you have more fishermen, maybe you buy part of the market and once you own part of the market, you vertically integrate. Then you buy another boat and then you have a whole fleet in a couple of years. You control the coast and you buy a bigger house and you’re a fishing empire. And then you know what you can do? You can do whatever you want. You can go fishing and play your guitar.”
It comes down, it’s cyclical. We’re going to do the same thing inevitably, as much as we chase these phantoms of success of acceptance. But it’s a contradiction; you have to live by that standard of one day and by the other one the next or else, there’s no duality. Without duality, we have nothing. It’s all about contrast. So, I swear by authenticity today. And tomorrow, I’m making a beautiful painting that doesn’t feel like me. But I need to make that beautiful painting that doesn’t feel like me. I need to make that very small compromise to know why I’m doing what I’m doing with authenticity. You need to exist in both worlds simultaneously. You jump back and forth to exist in two spheres, but it’s a self-correcting pattern if you are authentic.
You can purchase the original Peanut Butter Sandwich Program issue#10 in which this interview was published in my shop.