We were lucky to catch up with Jabari Weathers recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jabari , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
It was honestly very early on! I knew that I wanted to make (video) games when I was really young, like 10 or 11 years old, but the most tenable path felt like it was through artmaking, so early on in my creative development I angled toward concept art. It’s funny, now I’ve steered away from that and toward book and game illustration, but in my adolescence I was devouring so much media (especially tons of anime and video games), and searching for the how-to behind the scenes of how these artifacts were made. I honestly think that Adult Swim’s 2001-2007 anime block, along with the media my Mom had exposed me to earlier as far as tons of fantasy/sci-fi film/literature and shows just had my brain spinning in all of these worlds, and a pen and piece of paper was just always available for me.
Game design came later, near the middle section of college I started playing a bunch of the tabletop RPGs that I up till that point had largely only been able to read (without many folks besides my older cousin to play them with). I tried to make an RPG for my senior thesis, and even though that didn’t come to fruition, it did push me on the trajectory of pursuing writing and game design alongside my illustration work!
Jabari , 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?
So, I’m an illustrator from Baltimore, Maryland and I specialize in renderings of the fantastic, strange and surreal. My work can be found at Goblinprincete.com!
The road to my illustration work has been winding, but my history as a consumer of illustration is probably the best path forward. I remember from an early age being captivated by many Japanese artists working on promo and concept work for video games, anime and manga-the most notable in my memory being Ayami Kojima’s work on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. As I got older and dove more into the realm of video games, and film, I was introduced to more illustrators who would shape my work in both it’s visual form and just how I approach my creative practices. Brom’s book The Plucker was an amazing artifact to explore and his illustrations in it made me want to make similar things, and Brian Froud really immersed me into the world of the Dark Crystal (with the art book of the same name). Worldbuilding had always been huge to me, especially as a means to understand the world around me.
A lot of my wrestling with identity comes into my work in ways that are overt and purposeful and other ways that I am still figuring out. Being a marginalized person on multiple axes for the Scifi/fantasy space, I pour a lot of that tension into my work and the stories I tell of being so invested in a space that traditionally doesn’t invest in me (demographically speaking). That tension leads to a lot of fruitful creative grappling. My favorite pieces to make are works that are set in fantastic spaces, but deal with very intimate, human emotions-often through an almost symbolist approach. Most people use fantasy for escapism, and that’s honestly needed and something I wish came more naturally to me-but the canon of western fantasy has felt very negligent and hostile toward someone like me (black, queer, nonbinary, etc.) and so as I age with the genre, my love for it doesn’t diminish but my use of it becomes more as a vehicle to analyze and understand the world around me, as well as my own existence. That personal approach is something I truly hope shows clearly in my work.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
There was a year when I illustrated two tarot decks within a year of each other. One took two months, and the other took six. Typically, tarot decks take around 2 years for illustrators to complete, so it was a harrowing time. The latter deck, the Bluebeard’s Bride tarot of Servants, was also full of subject matter that was emotionally grueling (much as I love feminine gothic horror). I think that professional year shaved a decade off of my lifespan, though I’m proud of the work!
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I love being an artist professionally, and also it’s one of the most painful and grueling things. I don’t think that the larger world understands how unsupported artists are in making their work a trade, whether that is on the educational level, or the logistical. On top of that, it’s also mystified and romanticized. In recent years I’ve been losing the sense of play in art and fighting to rekindle it, and I think one of the things that grinds it away is a common notion that all that artists *do* is play. I honestly feel that the difficulty of art is evidence that it is for everyone, because it is a practice to work at just as much as everything else, but it gets valued as something less than work-almost like magic production from the ether.
In so many great stories, magic has its cost-its labor, too.
Contact Info:
- Website: goblinprincete.com
- Instagram: goblinprincete
- Twitter: goblinprincete
Image Credits
Human Being Productions