Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Isabella Choi. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Isabella, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Seeing that I was graduating soon, I filled my last fall semester at art school with classes where I would learn new techniques and mediums. One of these was my Digital and Analog class, a class that offered an introduction to riso printing. I became greatly interested in experimenting with the riso’s potential color blends and was intrigued with how running my traditional pieces through the machine offered a new perspective on art-making. The same piece could be granted different tones with an addition of a neon pink or a play of texture with the grain touch and screen touch options. My final assignment was a longer form zine about turning into a bird and how the need to take flight reflects our interactions with loss and goodbyes in human life. It was a enriching learning experience: planning out all the individual images per page, formatting a book for the first time, thinking about the cohesiveness in color, and incorporating my ongoing writing practice to the text of the book. I remember my awe when my prints first emerged, hot from the printer, and how the colors seemed to glow off the page due to the nature of the riso. With this, I became interested in image making being a beautifully infinite process, being able to revisit and rethink the image to appear in different physicalities, and how color is an immensely powerful, yet accessible and friendly, tool within it all.

Isabella, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Isabella Choi and I am a senior majoring in Illustration with a concentration in Literary Arts Studies at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design. I am endlessly exploring new ways of storytelling through a poetic approach of writing, alongside an art-making practice that heavily relies on experimentation. Through color, texture, and unconventional processes, I aim to create art that embodies a mundanely supernatural quality through paintings, illustrations, collages, and narrative imagery.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

A friend of mine recently showed me the picture book “The Snail” by Emily Hughes, a beautifully illustrated book that details, with magical simplicity, a memoir of Isamu Noguchi. The meditative, yet playful, approach he has to his work was a reminder to myself to, somewhat, maintain an unseriousness with art. Art is, to some extent, fun to make for the artist, or at least it consistently should be, for it can function as a reflective practice to one’s intimate problems. Artists are people, as needed by their practices, that inevitably would have to think and reflect heavily. To think of art not as a need to achieve but a way to accept one’s own complicated nature is a philosophy I now strive towards.

Hughes’s illustrations also were inspiring on a visual level: the softness of the graphite-like textures that captured such a unique sensitivity.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I think it is truly important to build one’s own creative community. The greatest lessons I’ve learned as a creative were from my own peers and the kindest, yet most honest, advice came from those around me. Be brave, talk to people, and find pieces that interests you from others at similar points in their creative journeys.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @ezjchoi

Image Credits

Isabella Choi