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

Jeff, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Goals and missions indicate that there is some kind of finalization. An end point. The creative journey ends at death, but the purpose is to celebrate life. I think an artist’s creative journey is a legacy of our experience in this reality. It serves so many purposes. It helps us to question and understand ourselves and our environments and how they relate to each other. It provokes ideas, starts conversations, and facilitates connection between people. For a lot of artists, including myself, the creative journey staves off depression and gives our lives meaning. There are goals and missions within the over-arching creative journey like improving skills, breaking comfort zones, overcoming weaknesses, and leveling up our careers. But I think the primary mission should be to see it out for as long as we are physically and mentally capable as an homage to the past, an honor to ourselves, and a reverence for the future.

Jeff, 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?

When we’ve been doing something for our entire lives with relentless curiosity and interest, we make countless decisions over the years to steer us deep into a certain lifestyle. This is the current that guided me to the moment I met my first Marvel editor. Decades of work elevated my art to a level that she was impressed by and I was given a shot to paint my first set of comic book covers. My work for the years prior consisted of traditional oil painting, editorial illustration, album cover designs for musicians, graffiti culture, and lots and lots of personal drawings, paintings, experimenting, and failures. I’m proud to have brought all of my creative history and influence to comics; a field that for a long time, and still to a degree, is very niche in style and work methods. My love for fine art, abstraction, and realism, sets me apart in my industry. Something I was slightly insecure about in the beginning, but now fully embrace. It’s impossible to not be coaxed by external influence but it’s crucial to boil that down and combine it with the unique way we view the world which amplifies our distinctive voice. Something I do my best to achieve in my work.

Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

It’s challenging to truly understand people and what contributes to the ways we behave and make decisions. For me to be at ease socially I need to achieve a certain amount of productivity with my art and for me to achieve this I must be secure with the close people and relationships in my life. They inform each other and keep me balanced in order to be present in both scenarios. There have been many times where I may not have had the best attitude or comfortability in a social situation even though it had nothing to do with the people present. Sometimes I can’t enjoy myself because my head is stuck in my work. Maybe I didn’t make enough progress that week or the progress I did make didn’t reach the standard I set for myself. Not to mention any number of other existential pressures or conflicts that we are all affected by. Understanding a person’s inner workings can take a lot of intimate time. When we are beginning to get to know someone it is very easy to sense rigidity and immediately think it has something to do with us because we are there in that moment. More often than not it runs deeper.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

Often what non creative people don’t realize is that art isn’t just something a person produces or creates in a moment. It can be, but I think art is more of a by-product from living a lifestyle of constant interpretation combined with a passion to reflect it back. The longer the artist has been working and the more attentive they are to their perceptions, the better the momentary product will be.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jeffdekal.com
• Instagram: @jeffdekal
• Twitter: @jeffdekal

Image Credits
Headshot credit: Gala Sheliagina