We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Austin Wade a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Austin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?
Pretty much my whole life I’ve felt like a black sheep. I never fit in in school or social circles. I got really attracted to metalcore and hardcore music in middle school as a result. It felt like a place where a bunch of weirdos like me could go and be ourselves. Even then, I still pretty often feel misunderstood and like I don’t fit in anywhere, or like nobody really gets how I work and think. That’s really the whole basis of my work. My hope is that someone can see a painting I’ve done about a certain situation or feeling and say “holy shit, that’s exactly what I feel”. Feeling heard and identified is absolutely paramount to healing past wounds and creating a comfort in ones self, so if someone can see my work and feel truly, deeply understood, I’ll have done my job.
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.
I’m a fine artist living in Los Angeles, originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Really I’m an art director by day at my full-time gig, and I moonlight as a painter and Instagram Stories comedian.
Around the time I started getting into punk/alternative music I also discovered graphic design. Design came first, but only by maybe a year or two. With very basic design foundations (I knew how to use the program Gimp, Photoshop was a pipe dream) I started dabbling with making (terrible) album covers and tee shirt designs. That all kinda snowballed over the next 5 years to actually working with local and national metalcore bands on album art, merch, tour posters, and social media stuff.
It was really all about the art, but design has a much more lucrative life in corporate work. I’d had a little corporate experience making things for friends and family friends businesses by the time I was 18, so I decided I’d go to college for it to fully grasp the breadth of the industry. Not sure why I did that, I think I just felt like I was missing out on “college life” and by the time I realized I hated it I was in too deep.
The best thing that came of college, though, was an internship with an artist named Derek Hess. Derek is an internationally renowned illustrator and fine artist who made his fame in the gig poster and band merch boom in the 90s. He also worked largely in the heavy metal world, so it made sense.
That internship, doing design for his social media and helping pack orders and build investment pitch decks for a festival he put on, really set me to where I am with my fine art now. My subject matter is very similar, a lot of human form, emotion, and blood. We both have a focus on mental health in our work. It was really like working with grown-up me.
Over the next several years from there I worked corporate design gigs and started to kinda dig in to fine art here and there on the side, mostly keeping to art for bands or tee shirt designs for my own thing, but the desire to be a fine artist was always there in secret. I was always playing with mediums and outlets, trying to find a style and a thing that felt like “me”, but also felt like it was informed and carried a mature and established weight to it.
In October 2019 I finally chased the dream of moving to LA. Ever since high school I’ve wanted to live here. I had a design teacher in 11th grade that told me “Move to LA, get an agent, don’t worry about the other crap. You’ve got the talent.” That was the day the whole LA dream was born. What I didn’t know was what would happen a few months into living here. 2020 was neat.
I got out here with the goal of landing a job at an agency as a designer and just working my way up through the ranks until I could either go big time freelance, or start my own agency. It was a design career move entirely. But, thanks to the pandemic, I suddenly had a whole lot of free time.
My girlfriend at the time and I both lost our jobs and went on pandemic unemployment, and got food stamps. It was honestly pretty sweet. I didn’t have to do anything for like a year. This lead to me deciding to pick up painting again.
I had been unsatisfied with the digital, still sitting, screen-laden monotony of design for a long time, but could never figure out a way to make it more interesting to me. I had painted throughout my life here and there for fun but never took it seriously, but figured maybe that was something that could both pass some time and provide the tactile feedback I had been craving from art. I bought some crappy brushes from a local art store, some dollar store paint and one small tube of good White, and just started to paint random things I had laying around.
That was it. I was hooked. I got swallowed into the world of fine art, learning about the likes of KAWS, Cleon Peterson, Michael Reeder, Daniel Arsham, Takashi Murakami, all the big dogs. I became obsessed with figuring out how they were doing what they were doing, and at the same time understanding what makes established art, established art. Compositions, techniques, palettes, materials, the whole nine.
Somewhere along 2021 I went back and referenced some old Procreate illustrations I did years prior and decided to redo them with what I had learned. That was the birth of what’s now my style. I had a bunch of drawings of these faceless, nude women in emotionally evocative poses, and I took that concept and ran with it. I ended up switching to mostly male figures as something about the muscularity and rigidity of the male just made sense for what I was going through at the time, and I developed almost a “character”. He doesn’t have a name, and he doesn’t represent any one person or thing. He’s purely a vehicle to communicate emotions.
That leads to where I am today. As of this week (writing this September 13th) I’m gearing up to release my first full, cohesive body of work that follows a theme and details the story of a very deep and painful depression I went through last year. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like I have a style, a “look”, a technique, and a sense of knowing what I’m doing when it comes to painting.
Crazy it’s really only been a few years since I picked it up, and only really one since settling on a style!
That’s a lot, sorry. I ramble
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Jesus. My whole life? In the last 5 years alone I’ve been through a traumatic breakup, a concussion, lost my home, moved across the country, experienced a global pandemic, lost my job several times, went through another breakup, moved like 5 times in 2 years, tanked my credit, racked up a TON of debt, went through a dangerous depressive episode twice, and discovered I have ADHD (for real, I did the doctor test).
I’ve always had severe depression and anxiety, and I’ve always been broke and in survival mode. I just don’t really know how to give up I guess. I have a big crazy dream and I think I’d be more miserable just giving up and living a mundane life with a job I don’t care about than I am pursuing all the (probably unwise) stuff I do.
They always say the difference between successful people and not is just a matter of persistence. Also I’m really stubborn. I think it’s just an innate thing in me that doesn’t know how to stop chasing something I want. It always ends up working out, so I’ve got no reason to question it. No matter how hard it gets I’ll always keep at it.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
This is a really interesting one, especially now with the first gold rush being over. It reminds me of that time in 2016 where bitcoin hit 16k and everyone became a crypto expert, only for it to crash for 5 years.
After that 5 years, though, it surged again. I think NFTs will do the same. They’re in their infancy and the use case really hasn’t had time to develop yet. There’s an insane amount of potential for them. I know some artists are using them as Certificates of Authenticity which is cool, allowing there to be a tracker of exchanges as well as royalties to the artist.
I see a ton of upside to it. I’m excited for the picture frame sized screen that you wirelessly link to your metamask and display your NFT art on like a regular picture frame on your wall. Right now it’s mostly TVs or monitors just full-screen viewing stuff, but imagine literally a picture frame. Same 1 inch deep profile, no other capabilities, just shows the art you own through your NFT wallet. A nice coating on the LCD to make it look less like a screen. It’ll happen.
I also like the idea of NFT VR art galleries. OnCyber is a service doing this, but it’s just through your browser. With Apple really bringing VR to the mainstream now, it’s a matter of time until you can go to an NFT gallery with your little avatar character and be there “walking around” with other people, talking on proximity chat, hearing the soundtrack, all from your couch. There’s businesses taking 3D scans of rooms and translating them into virtual spaces. Imagine if you could have a digital art show inside a missile silo with people from all over the planet. And then you can sell the pieces as one-offs or editions, and those buyers can put their purchased piece up on their NFT picture frame, and 2 weeks later a surprise physical print of the artwork shows up at their door. The potential is really exciting.
It’s a huge bummer that the endlessly generated mix-n-match JPG monkeys became the face of NFTs. It really soiled the general public perception of what it is and can be. I think in a couple of years they’ll make a big, much more pragmatic comeback, and hopefully people can forget about the money laundering monkey.
Contact Info:
- Website: austinxwade.com/store
- Instagram: @austinxwade