We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful V Holecek. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with V below.

V, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

I had a much longer answer for this typed up, but in the end I felt it got entirely too far out into the weeds, running the risk of impertinence more than what your readers would probably be willing to tolerate, so in the interests of brevity, I present some key facts:

Providing a basic foundation of context for everything else is the reality that I am quite literally the result of a rather ancient adult film cliche. You see, my mother was the babysitter for my father’s son from his first marriage (to my knowledge, my dad was already separated from his first wife at the time, but I’ve never heard that explicitly clarified, so I may be wrong on that point), and so any notion of me growing into any kind of median, functional adult was more or less jettisoned into the Nether Regions of Possibility.

The other component was that my mother realized fairly early in the game that I was pretty easy to manage. If she sat me down with paper and things to mark on it with, I would mostly take care of myself. This would come back to bite my parents in the ass when it came time to enroll me in school and there were people there who expected me to perform tasks other than drawing pictures of whatever random shit just happened into my head. We’ll simply say that I was a less-than-model student and leave it there.

But all this is the say that I think that among the things that were done right was the probably unusual (by today’s standards, at least) amount of autonomy I was given at a very young age by my mother. My father was a different story, but I did say that I was not going to spill my entire life story in the interests of brevity here.

V, 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?

I’m a visual media artist, living and working out of Kansas City, Missouri. I specialize in two-dimensional works of a dark and/or surreal nature, but have been branching more into three-dimensional works in recent years. My body of work tends to be a mesh of occult and Cold War-era aesthetics.

Apart from my body of paintings and drawings, I am accumulating a collection of “modestly-cursed” objets d’art. My primary influences tend to be latter 20th-Century Polish surrealists and American dark artists. I’m not sure how to better explain myself, but I will definitely say that I’m not the kind of artist that is going to waste your time if I don’t think a particular project is in my wheelhouse, and I have probably turned down more projects than my fans will probably ever be able to quantify.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

There is no real shortcut that I can offer. If I had to boil building a following down to the barest ingredients, I would say you really need two things above all else: Time and Personality.

Time is a given, there’s no way around that. But the amount of time you’ll need can also depend on the second factor of Personality. In the hierarchy of things people will remember about an artist’s body of work, personality is second only to your caliber and style of work (both of which are only developed by time), but I learned early on that people buying art might not be able to remember the name of the piece they bought or even tell you anything about the medium or the technical details…but they will definitely be able to tell you about the artist, and the more memorable you can make yourself, the better.

In my social media presence, this takes the form of what can really only be explained as “existential shitposting”. I feel like most of us do this to some degree these days with the way things have been going…its all fun and games until you start vibing with memes that make you question the nature of your existence.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Spite, mostly.

Whenever I start to feel like I’m giving myself over to feelings of despair (which have been plentiful during the pandemic), I take a moment to think of the people who told me that I shouldn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t do it, and I press on mostly out a stubborn refusal to let those jackasses be right about anything where I’m concerned.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.schamballah.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vholecekart/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vholecekart/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/vholecekart
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@VHolecek