We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anastasio Wrobel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Anastasio thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I am getting ready to relaunch my 2016 project “The Non-Binary Coloring Book” and will do so with an expansion of drawings as well as the original 50 illustrations included. When this project began the landscape for transgender media was still intermittent – the web of community who were creating both past and present began to intersect and meet one another – the years passed and we are blessed with so many projects, comics, paintings, photographs, biographies, fiction and more from the transgender perspective that it feels excellent to be bringing my individual story to join so many others in speaking our truth. This project was an anti-coloring book at the time, focusing on an amalgamation of shapes and curves and structures within each character, oftentimes the people I drew were influenced by people in my everyday life. The element of making oneself and the fantasy of freedom drove this project to the finish line and pushed to sell out three separate times with copies going to Sweden, Germany, Australia, Canada, Mexico and all over the USA. These figurative works were inspirational to people who had never seen fat bodies illustrated or combined with beautiful elements to show up and be adorned. The project was a window in time and I plan to review it with the 5th printing in Portland, OR starting early 2024. Having this object be the focus of independent study and taking it from start to finish has been a dream! I have watched it connect trans youth to language they didn’t know they needed, or people tell me they gifted it to family members they were supporting in their journey. It is a splendid artifact and I look forward to revising it for reproduction!

Anastasio, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Anastasio Wrobel, they/them/theirs pronouns and I am an abstract expressionist painter from the high desert of Santa Fe, NM. I grew up enamored by the fluorescent desert sunsets and making soft pastel landscape pictures. My backyard was Canyon Road and between gallery hopping, art openings, lectures and special projects I honed my creativity with disposable film cameras. I knew about a lot of things and places and events I could not access simply due to my class.I was an only child until my baby sister came to join me on earth and I was raised by several adults, aunties, uncles and my grandparents all had a hand in my care and well-being; therefore they all had an opinion of who I should be.

I wanted to document life and the passing of time and make artifacts since an early age, and found many creative outlets to pursue. My grandfather was an accountant and helped me with my creative side hustles – often selling small crafts around my apartment complex and looking for ways to make things and sell them. After six long years attending Catholic school for junior high and elementary I finally began my official arts journey in Seattle, WA in 2010. I began trade school for commercial photography and dropped out shortly thereafter being disillusioned with the formulaic demands and specificities “prohibiting my creativity”. In 2010 I started pursuing fine arts and settled into my core curriculum of drawing, painting and printmaking. I began showing my art in winter 2011 and after that began a prolific exploration into abstraction, expressionism, and the correlation of writing and painting to ongoing events and news stories. Throughout the decade, I would sell many artworks and establish myself under the alias aung.robo. I moved to Olympia, WA in 2014 to finish my undergraduate studies with abbreviated stays in New York City working with Belladonna* publishing and then eventually taking a short residence in Sweden.

I graduated in 2016 from The Evergreen State College with an emphasis in gender studies and visual arts and launched my illustrative project “The Non-Binary Coloring Book.” This project was composed upon my movement that I call reactionary expressionism – something that describes the heat of the moment when you are not thinking but painting and the color work takes over, and the overlay creates a chasm of depth on a 2D surface, or making something with coded language, intention and process therein. My work is about capturing the moments we live through and working through them in paint layers. In order to do this well, I have learned countless processes and taught others what I know in privates or small group settings. Things like writing about oneself and one’s work, necessary copy for running a small practice and introducing new projects, website design, image editing and specifications for photographing artworks, marketing, screen printing, so many things I cannot even think of in this moment because over the past 12 years these processes are familiar and secondary in nature.

Andy Warhol was the first artist I really looked up to and from there began to worship Basquiat for the language he created and I yearn to do something similar. I made landscapes on the land Georgia O’Keefe was possessed with, printed clothing with pro-trans political messages and photographed myself wearing it in the hills of South Santa Fe. I learned to pour paint like Helen Frankenthaler and finally fall into Judith Butler’s important work or the writings of Leslie Feinberg and little by little find comfort for my expansion and advocate for others’ expansion as well. I am not only a visual artist, but I am a renaissance they – I will show you that you can be however you want to be simply by being my full, whole, beautiful self.

I have been trying to figure out what sets me apart from others my whole life. As you can imagine, being a genderqueer is not always glitter, glee and easy, in fact it has been my desire for self-love, self-fulfillment and validation that carries my work now. I am grappling with what it means to generate “work” in climate crisis, late-stage capitalism and how I want to move into the next decade of this art-making. I am most proud of myself for how far I’ve come and that I continue to act creatively while remaining soft in a harsh world.

I think that my work oscillates between the very polished contemporary work that influences our social media sphere but then it always gets a little wild. I throw paint or overwork something or get too detailed in too many corners, it all depends on the mood and subject and the reaction to the moment and sometimes it is less about the outcome and more about the process, or the time between beginning and completion and what emerges when it’s “enough.”

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is having a completely unique perspective that can bring people together and being a light that people can see and having the utmost freedom to do whatever you want! It really is a type of energy one has especially when in close proximity to the fire of creativity, it is an alchemical process that takes over mind and body, soul is fluid – out there to gather things and ingest as needed – nothing feels greater than being wholly devoted to a vision and the process of seeing it from beginning to end.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I have built my social media presence by meeting people in person and sharing my artwork. That’s all, showing up and showing out. I think social media plays an undeniable role in artist’s success and capacity to succeed, and while it is invaluable to have a worldwide following it is absolutely essential to put down technology and go out to openings! Go to lectures, galleries, museums, shows, cafes, anything where someone is creating something, show up by yourself (without your phone) and say hi, make connections and make conversation. You never know who you’ll get to know and there is nothing like being cheered and celebrated live. I am one of the millennials that grew up without technology and has seen its progression over my lifetime.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @transpicasso
• Other: [email protected]