Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Steven Solomon AKA Speed Paste Robot. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Steven Solomon, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Right here and now: doing my minicomics since 2022 has the most meaning for me.
I have had a checkered creative career making sculpture, painting and graphic design.
A long series of text-based paintings culminated in a solo show called READ ME at the sadly now-shuttered Wayfarers gallery space in Bushwick, Brooklyn in late 2019 right before the pandemic. I was fortunate enough to be able to keep working on my ongoing graphics projects but also, in quarantine kept working on those paintings.
At the end of the pandemic I was invited to participate in a remote show at the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. I chose to create stop-action animations of those text-paintings in progress. It was partially a prank, like a goofball version of “The Mystery Of Picasso”–but I wound up making a set of animations and an accompanying set of text paintings called *squeeek* which began with Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a starting point.
I mean we all woke up transformed and were apparently absurdly obsessed with “getting to our jobs”. Gregor Salsa was a catalyst but the animations/paintings took that set of collaged, text-obsessed, layered, appropriated concerns as far as I could go.
SO: after that project, I wanted to go back to drawing again. I wanted everything–all the thinking/feeling to go through _my_ own eyeballs and hands, ink on paper. If I was entranced by a quote, no more printing it out and glueing onto a canvas, it needed to get wired through my own pen.
Slowly and with many restarts I began the minicomics I have been self-publishing since 2022. I love comics and have had to go almost backwards, starting with a panel-to-panel juxtaposition of image and word taking cues from absurdist theatre and poetry and slowly working towards finding my own way towards a more contained form of storytelling.
Let’s say the comics are going from “completely fractured narrative” to “partially broken narrative”.
From the start the responses from readers and even passersby when I first made large posters of the initial comics has been very, very different from painting. Even when the nominal “subject matter” or “content” are the same to me, the change of medium meant a much more direct and emotional connection.
For me, it’s meaningful, engaging and scary. What more could one ask for? When the printed copies show up on my doorstep it’s always energizing to hold an actual comic book I made in my own hands. And when I see a 9 year old or a 50 year old reading it and connecting, that makes me want to keep going.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Right now I am posting a comic strip a week on my bare bones website. The comic strip is currently called TOO MANY WAYS OF SEEING.
I am in some ways pretending that the independent weekly newspaper comic strip still exists today and using the creative constraint of a half page comic strip not to make a “graphic novel” but to make a self-contained, imperfect energy filled comic.
It’s a “weekly comic strip, delivered almost weekly”. I started it this year as I continue to refine the collections in my self-published minicomics but wanted a more regular and contained way to get them out into the world.
While I post on the socials I am offering this comic as a weekly email and also posting on my “antisocial blog”.
The goal is to connect with the small group of engaged readers. Ideally the email, not the algorithmically manipulated method would be best.
To sign up for the email: https://speedpasterobot.us7.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=63089611173244c1f420f428d&id=36ce1b6b69
The blog is: https://www.speedpasterobot.com/antisocial.html
Instagram: @speedpasterobot
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
The Dale Carnegie rule of “do first things first”! I wish I had known that the smallest, simplest way to start the most important things is not a theoretical framework… it’s EVERYTHING.
Giving one’s own work the minimal structure that a dishwashing or busboy, or client design work has! Roll your own.
Also, anything worth doing is worth doing BADLY.
I also must confess that using an “eggtimer” and clocking in for one’s own efforts is a very valuable tool. to GET STARTED and to KEEP STARTING AGAIN. Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Method is super-helpful.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, Ambivalent Zen by Lawrence Shainberg and MacDoodle Street by Mark Alan Stamaty are all so important to me that I need to list them even though they don’t directly answer your question!
Lunch Poems because it is a model of economy, precision and wit.
Ambivalent Zen because its honesty and evocation of facing a blank wall over and over again is so good. Plus it’s written with humor and humanity.
MacDoodle Street because Stamaty’s comic is overflowing with life. Also it’s witty and humorous.
(My entrepreneurial philosophy involves staying alive to the possibilities of good lunch poems, self-depracating no BS memoirs and great cartooning.)
Also readers should seek out and read Edanur Kuntman’s graphic novel “Tales From Behind The Window” and Nick Bertozzi’s graphic novel “Shackleton, Antarctic Odyssey.”
To answer the question I would say that Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit are three books that I have gone back to again and again especially when I am muddling through and paralyzed by perfectionism/hesitation/overwhelm.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.speedpasterobot.com
- Instagram: @speedpasterobot
- Twitter: @speedpasterobot
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@speedpasterobot
Image Credits
Speed Paste Robot