We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alex Menzor a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Alex, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
Pretty early on, I’d say around 7th or 8th grade I knew I wanted to pursue a creative career. Art is the only thing that’s ever made complete sense to me. Originally I wanted to be a concept artist for the gaming industry, but after learning to mix color palettes my sophomore year of high school I knew I wanted to study painting and fine art. My main worry was that there were no “real jobs” in the industry related to my area of study. So rather than dive head first into a degree program I was unsure about, I enrolled at Kalamazoo Valley Community College with the intention of transferring to Western’s Gwen Frostic School of Art after my prerequisites were finished, although I never ended up transferring. My first semester at KVCC I ended up winning first place in a student showcase along with a check for $100 for a piece I’d entered thanks to the encouragement of my painting instructor, and I think that was the first time I started to think it might be possible to actually earn an income from painting.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Hi, I’m Alex. I’m a queer, deaf multidisciplinary artist based out of Kalamazoo, MI. I earned my Associates in Illustration from Kalamazoo Valley Community College (where I also developed much of my painting technique) in 2021 and completed an intensive nine month painting residency through the Kirk Newman Art School at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in 2022. I’ve been working as a freelance artist and illustrator since my graduation, though I’ve been a small business owner longer.
I took the leap into self employment in 2016 making jewelry originally. I had previously worked at a bank where I realized how miserable I was, and my deteriorating hearing was making it next to impossible to do my job. That was back in 2016 I think. I did arts and crafts markets, small bar shows, local music festivals and sold online for years before making the decision to go back to school and finish my degree. I think my first real gig as an illustrator was being the designated band artist for Kalamazoo local band Trifocal.
As my focus has shifted back into visual arts following graduation and the completion of my painting residency, most of my artist wages at this time come primarily from commissions and print sales when I can get them. My work as a painter the last couple of years has focused heavily on shining and reflective objects, and I aim to enthrall viewers in the little worlds and details contained within antique metals, minerals, and psychedelic rolling glass scapes. Ultimately I seek to restore novelty to objects and settings we might otherwise find unremarkable, because I think it’s important to have those little moments of stillness and wonder in our everyday lives with the world being the way it is right now.
Although I still derive great sources of inspiration from places like rock shops and secondhand glassware displays, my plans for future bodies of work will seek to merge older areas of fascination with my developing painting style and life experience. Kaleidoscopic perspectives and liminal scenes from my time living in Ann Arbor between 2022 and 2024 can be expected to carry themes in my upcoming bodies of work.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
In day to day life, I think one of the most commonly asked questions I get is “what happened to your hearing?” So I’ll address that here since it’s radically altered how I do things over the years. I’m late in life deafened. I had perfect hearing until my early twenties when I literally woke up one day and had lost a significant portion of my hearing in my right ear. The following day I woke up to find my left ear had also been affected. It was diagnosed as sudden profound hearing loss, with the cause unknown. I was able to get by with hearing aids for a couple of years, but it’s progressed to the point they no longer help me with discerning speech so I’ve started learning ASL and looking into cochlear implantation. In spite of the trauma and difficulty that came with all of that, I was able to pull myself together and eventually finish my associate’s program and a painting residency with accommodation and help from peers and faculty. Above all, this has taught me that like my art, I am adaptable and ever changing. It makes things like vending and speaking in person to prospective clients extremely difficult, but I do my best to work with the tools at my disposal and to keep moving forward. I don’t share this to garner sympathy, but I DO want to draw attention to the necessity for accommodation in our society. This sort of thing can happen to anybody at any time. I hope to someday use my own experience to help others going through similar trials. Be patient, be kind. A little compassion can go a long way.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Every time I paint I seek to outdo myself; “How can I do this better next time around? What can I do differently? This is a really striking visual, I wonder if I could recreate that”, etc. My main goal with my personal work is to just outdo the last piece. The only person I’m competing with is myself. If I can paint something and be like “wow, that came out of me? I have no idea how I just did that”, that’s the best feeling to me. And if other people end up liking it too, then that’s also very cool.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.
alexmenzor.com/
- Instagram: @alexmenzorillustration
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexmenzorillustration
- Other: TikTok – @apmenzor
Image Credits
Hayleigh Beadle (Hayleigh B. Photography)