We recently connected with Loomis Henry and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Loomis thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is whatever project has me by the throat by way of the heart currently. How could it be otherwise? This morning I woke up, fed the dogs, took a long good piss, thought about scrambled eggs, thought against social media, reflected on the beauty of the dawn and then the ugly horrors of our time, incited, as ever, by rampant human stupidity and greed, before grabbing my pens and brushes and getting to back to work on my latest design.

This design is anchored around a hand painted portrait I did of the elegant, mysterious and incandescent vortex of intellectual depth and talent that was Clarice Lispector. Clarice was a Brazilian writer who published a series of impressionistic novels in the 6o’s and 70’s that explored, through an often surreal and dark lens, themes of identity, existentialism and sexuality. I saw a picture of her once and was immediately captivated by the vitality, dignity and defiance in her eyes. A look that is at once fierce and supple and cuts like a gorgeous laser in direct opposition to the faces of the celebrities pushed upon us today. Faces like the bottom of styrofoam cups or mannequins assembled by dirty hands and empty heads in a factory of abominations centrally located in hell.

I love to imagine great thinkers and mighty rebels, iconoclasts if you will, from other eras like Clarice alive today and doing like Ted Talks, lectures in prominent venues, poetry readings and even rock concerts! So I make posters for these events because being alive in a body in the 21st century is not unlike standing under a loud waterfall of bright, bubbly sludge. A waterfall that does its very best to saturate your every pore with a sticky varnish, the sole purpose of which, is to shellack you as a consumer and nothing more.

My works are umbrellas, a necessary shield that allows me to see and think clearly and entertain horizons under this maniacal sludge. Would that my works could actually find the shut off valve for this incessant stream of soul sucking nonsense and blow it to smithereens if just for a generation or ten. A man can dream, can’t he?

Loomis, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Loomis Henry. I am the firstborn son of a Mexican Mother and Scottish, American Father. I grew up like a weird flower in the suburbs of Northern California. I am quite happy to tell your readers that I remember a vigorous landscape that existed long before the second coming of Christ announced itself as the latest Iphone release. I remember a much more organic world where reality was defined, honed and navigated with more honesty, where the fabric of what was “real” was defined by an almost animal intuition. We moved across the landscape without GPS coordinates, bought and listened to music by the grand exploration of record stores and met and fell in love with others in the cross hairs of the naked eye.

I was ten years old when I was first awe struck by a work of artistic expression. It was the cover of a Batman comic book I saw on a spinner rack at a 7-11. The cover was beautiful and disturbing. It was illustrated by a giant talent named Neal Adams. It depicted, in four panels, Robin literally dying and turning to dust in Batman’s arms and below the panels an overhead shot with Batman looking up screaming in this pile of skeletal dust. The expressionist angle, brooding inks and baroque angst of the overall composition haunted me for quite a long time and acted as a gateway drug to other artistic forms of expression throughout my adolescence/adulthood/second adolescence that communicated raw, uncomfortable truths in a poetic way. I gestated in that suburb in a stew of comics, punk rock, David Lynch films and the wisdom of life’s great explorers: Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski to name a few. I have no formal art training whatsoever. I take that back. I did one semester at San Jose City College and took a drawing class but got expelled for nearly lighting the classroom on fire. We can save that story for another interview…

In 2013 I launched a t-shirt brand called “Sketch & Destroy” wherein I attempted (and failed) to captivate an audience that I thought existed in North America. I screen printed my own shirts using hand drawn artwork that featured, once again, great thinkers from the past re-imagined as rappers and self help gurus. One of my personal favorites was “The Henry Rollins Institute of Inner Fucking Peace”. I drew Henry sitting in a lotus position with this like new age rainbow design behind him and tag lines about hardcore meditation and hardcore bliss. “Just Breathe…Or Else!” Another favorite was Salvador Dali striking a pose like Flavor Flav from “Public Enemy” with a baseball cap on backwards and a giant melting clock on a chain around his neck. The public yawned.

So, after about seven years of toil and crying myself to sleep at night to the sound of crickets I sold my entire back stock of t-shirts along with my screen printing press and thereby obtained my masters degree in failure. It’s quite a teacher, that son of a bitch. The true creative spirit though is like a lizards tail that grows back after being chopped off or a vine that coils through a gate. The need to express yourself with whatever talents you may possess will always find a new way to grow through obstacles. It’s the determination of pure fire.

Jump forward to 2020 and there I stand, fortune smiling and the gods playing nice for once. I was given the opportunity to exhibit the artwork that I had crafted for my t-shirt company during those seven years at a venue in Phoenix where I currently live. Seeing the work framed and hanging on the walls, and the great reception the designs had on the crowd that showed up at the reception inspired me to turn to poster design which is what I do today.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I can although it may be a bit much for your readers but then again to not tell it would be an unforgivable omission as I feel that if even one human being is helped by hearing it then the ordeal I barely survived wasn’t for nothing. So I was put on a medication for insomnia in early 2008. I was dating a woman who got diagnosed with cancer and I had this super stressful job. I started having really bad insomnia. Anyhow, I go see this doctor and he immediately and happily puts me on a pill called Ambien. He told me it was safe and I just needed to take it every night. I blinked and 13 years went by. Well, he retired in 2021 and so I go to see this new Doctor my insurance assigned me to for a back injury and when he sees that I’ve been on Ambien for 13 years scolds me and cold turkeys me on the spot.

This pill belongs to a class of drugs called benzodiazepines. They are, by the FDA’s very own black box warning, not to be taken or prescribed for longer than 2-3 weeks due to dependency. And these medications are harder to kick than heroin. I was never told this by the first doctor nor did I sign any release stating that I was aware of any risk factors that could lead to severe health problems. I followed both doctors orders and what ensued was nothing short of a nightmare that almost cost me my life. Abrupt discontinuation of this class of medications can lead to seizures, even death. The shock to my brain after taking the pills for so long damaged my central nervous system and led to a year and a half long stretch of suffering that defies human comprehension. What happens is the drugs down regulate the parasympathetic nervous system and when you stop taking them it’s like your body is suddenly a car with an accelerator glued to the floor and no brakes. I stopped sleeping. I developed a sensitivity to noise and light so bad that I could not leave the house. I lost 40 lbs in six months, developed akathesia, which is this terrible condition where you cannot sit still and often leads many to unalive themselves. I also developed agoraphobia, suffered hallucinations and this awful state of chemical terror where you feel the same level of panic for weeks and months on end as if you are being chased by a wild animal.

Imagine lying in a dark room shaking and going out of your mind with terror with no real way to distract for a year because your cognition is so compromised you cannot focus on anything. This means no TV, no books, no music and the most terrible of all: NO. CREATIVITY. Can you? Can anyone? And yet this gruesome experience is happening to thousands of people the world over due to a healthcare paradigm beholden to Big Pharma. I firmly believe this appalling state of affairs will surface in the mainstream media in very much the same way the opioid crisis did a decade ago. And there will be hell to pay.

So if you want to talk about resiliency, then I would submit to your readers the year I was bed bound and unable to draw because my hands shook so bad it was like I had Parkinson’s. I would underscore the tiny spark I kept alive in my heart in the face of unspeakable madness and suffering. It’s like what Bukowski says about always holding on to that small piece of yourself in the face of life’s very worst experiences because “a spark can set a whole forest on fire…”

I am happy to report, now nearly a year and a half off the medication that I am 90% healed and creating quality work at a pace unlike any other chapter in my life.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Certainly, the goal is to keep the fires of wisdom alive through a growing body of work that celebrates my love for the deep thinkers and creative doers I mentioned before, the human beings who push back at the status quo, who dare speak truth to power, who entertain their audiences with a deep and abiding respect for the human intellect. If my work is met with indifference or goes largely ignored because I choose to passionately communicate this love to the world so be it. This is the hill I will die on. I know in my heart of hearts there will come a time when the fascination with the bells and whistles of our own demise will cease to be the interactive novelty that it is today, that glamorized stupidity will wind up in the Smithsonian next to what remains of the dinosaur. Call me a hopeless romantic but I see a vigorous and dissident energy in todays youth that is not just knee jerk cynicism. I think the young people in the world are much more sophisticated and better informed and if, at least in the United States, we are to circle back to the dignity, integrity and creative wisdom of our elders, of the great spirits like Walt Whitman, Thoreau and Nina Simone, it is the children of the future that will lead us there.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/sketchNdestroy
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sketchanddestroy/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/loomis.henry