We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Devin Hernandez-Horne a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Devin, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
When I was 18 staring at the future in front of me I could see so many different possibilities. I didn’t know what I wanted and ultimately went to community college to give myself time to just figure myself out. It worked in a dramatic way, I ended up having a very turbulent first semester. My devastating first taste of heartbreak that laid waste to my grades. The only class I passed that year was my foundation drawing class, and that decided it for me. I thought I couldn’t bring myself to even eat, but I could still force myself to draw. I knew I was going to face a lot of difficult things in the future so this is what I should do, you know, for survival.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Hey! I’m a visual artist from the hottest and dustiest parts of California. I make work under the name Artist Home, a name that comes from the way one of my last names, Horne, is often misread. I paint, I draw, and other things in that world. My work tends to touch on ideas of identity and the interaction of humanity with nature.
I think I’m still very new to the world of freelance, but what got me started was just talking to others further in their career than me. There’s a few pockets of the community that focuses on helping out new artists trying to get started. Illustration is a lot of cold emailing, you get a lot of no responses, but if you keep shooting in the dark eventually you’ll hit something. Lately I’ve been making short comics for social media and newspapers. I first started with two short comics for my instagram, that eventually led to work with the LA Times.
I’ve always loved storytelling and comics have been the perfect vessel for that. I pull a lot from my own experiences, my relationship with my family is complicated. Being someone that exists outside a lot of conventions in a very conservative family has given me a lifetime of drama in an already dramatic upbringing. Art has given me a lot of freedom to just live as myself, I can be weird, different, and confusing. It all comes with the job description.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The best thing it’s given me is a different way to look at the world. I take everything in, the way sunlight can hit a leaf or the feeling of water running across your skin. The smallest things in life find a home in my memories. It probably contributes how easy it is for me to fall in love with things… there’s just a lot of rad things out there you know. And I get the chance to experience it.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Trying to fit myself into a role or art style. At art school I felt a lot of pressure to make work that would make administration happy. My background was wildly different from the culture at a private school. I ended creating a lot of things I didn’t like, and putting a lot of work into things that weren’t me. I had to learn to stop trying to make whatever it is I thought people wanted from me. It was not an easy thing to do, it was actually terrifying. But there are a lot of people who aren’t going to like my work. It just doesn’t matter, because there’s going to be just as many people who do like it. It took me being very venerable, and just making the jump to make something entirely self indulgent. Support from my friends got me through my self doubt and now I’m quite happy doing my own thing. I still draw on things I learned from college but now I do it in a way more true to myself.
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