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

Jim, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When I was very young. Probably like 10 years old, when I saw my grandfather retire from his job as a civil engineer, and struggle with what to do with himself after retirement. I decided I should never retire, so never have a real job, which left few options. Since he also was responsible for encouraging me to draw, I figured ‘artist’ was a natural choice.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have always spent a lot of time alone, creating. Drawing mostly, but as I got older and got more serious about being an artist, I expanded into painting, sculpture, and building functional things, such as furniture, while simultaneously building non-functional artworks. After I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan with a fine arts degree, concentrating in Painting, I moved to NYC and jumped into the East Village Art scene. I struggled a bit there because it seemed that everyone in the East Village was painting, and looking around at so much art boggled my mind to such a degree that I think I lost interest in painting, and began taking walks and picking up junk from the streets and made art with that instead. An artist/beekeeper friend of mine (Garnett Puett) had a sister, Morgan, who had just moved to NYC from Chicago, who had also ‘strayed’ from art to clothing design, wanted to open a store, and loved what I was doing with found materials. She asked me to help her build her store with my ‘stuff’ so I did that. She had a big following of celebrities, such as Carly Simon, Bette Midler, and Michael Stipe. She was getting a lot of attention for her clothing and the wild eccentricities of the way we were putting old tin, steel and wood together for the interior of the store. Her ‘fame’ grew and we built a bigger store in Soho. By then I was being written about for my furnishings in her store, which eventually expanded into true furniture, free of store fixtures. Having a basement welding shop in Soho in the Early 1990’s was perfect for me to show my work to artistic people populating Soho at the time. Lots of people commissioned me to make steel furniture and I really was able to develope my own industrial steel style, which was very new at the time. The contemporary ‘art’ furniture market was tiny back then, and my work became ‘known’, particularly in NYC. I think the industrial steel was so new that I was sort of inundated with calls. About that time, I took out an ad in the New York Observer, thinking I could ‘reach’ celebrity types. That landed quite well, quite quickly. I got a lot of calls from people including Lou Reed, who came to the studio and ordered a PILE of furniture for his home and his office. We became pretty good friends, and I ended up designing a lot of stuff for him for the next 10 years, including his home music studio. Having Lou as a ‘patron’ was a big feather in my cap, so to speak. We had a lot of fun together, and there was a lot of mutual respect creatively. That was probably one of my most proud moments, I would have to say. I felt like I had ‘cracked’ NYC in a big way to have such a legend coming to my studio, and going to his house to design stuff with him. He had very specific needs, which was very challenging in a great way. Wendy Goodman, who was an Editor at Harper’s Bazaar at the time wrote a big 3 page article about me and that also helped a LOT. I felt famous overnight in a way. But that is a slippery slope (the idea of ‘fame) because a new magazine comes out in a month, and one can feel forgotten very quickly. So, I also learned NOT to lean on past ideas of attention or fame and allowed that success to feed my flames to work even harder. What separates me from others may be that I never got as much inspiration from design much. I was always a sort of ‘material conceptualist’ really. Materials were always the ‘seed’ of my ideas, so the result was often not always recognizable as design in the more traditional way. I use oddball things I find in old factories, or coal from a coal mine, or rubber from a tree because I noticed on the commodities pages of the Wall St. Journal that everything has a price, even rubber from a tree. That kind of information blows my mind. I needed to find rubber from a tree.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I don’t think most people are taught to think creatively. I think creative thinking could inform every aspect of civilization and help people solve problems by thinking outside the box more. I think people are so programmed to solve problems through math and science, and I respect all things scientific and mathematical, but they don’t always have what it takes to solve every problem. People make fun of artists, unless they’re pop artists with huge amounts of money. Respect in America, and so the world seems always to be based in fame and fortune, but little attention is paid to the real creative process. It’s unique to live in a creative process of thinking. Watching people struggle to think creatively is painful to watch. I think everyone should regularly pick up a pencil and paper and draw whatever comes to mind. NOT necessarily representational! Make a line, connect a dot, DOODLE!!!! Write ‘stream of consciousness’ words without thinking about it. Open one’s mind to a new way of thinking that has no goal in mind, no end game. Let that process just be what it is at the moment. Put the pencil down and come in the next day and see what you’ve done. You may start making connections in your daily life with what may become reflections of your thinking itself. Be fun, funny, silly, ridiculous, angry, mean. Let your freak flag fly on the page. See who you become. You may be Bob Dylan and not even know it.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

NFT’. I am not into Digital ANYTHING. I think technology is useful for certain things, but has become an obsession of a lot of people who are so ‘geeked out’ already that they actually think of themselves as the ‘next big thing’, which I think is ultimately boring. Investments are investments however you slice them. Art as investment doesn’t really interest me in the least.

Contact Info:

• Website: [email protected]
• Instagram: Jim Zivic Design