REVOLUTION DAILY

What’s your day job?
I work as an illustrator at Am I Collective in Cape Town.

What kind of art do you make and enjoy?
I’ve always enjoyed painting, drawing and working with my hands, but these days I’m trying focus on just drawing. I have a lot of fun distorting figures, subverting the logic of forms and building textures. I’m constantly busy with new drawings and i’m starting to try and fit it all together contextually, so i can start building on a much larger narrative, that will eventually (hopefully) read like some sort of mythology.

I enjoy all kinds of other art. I specifically get excited about comic art and books and stuff. I like it when art tells a story, or changes the way we look at things.

Other than that, what do you get up to in your free time?
I like playing and recording music. I also dabble in a bit of animation, photography and do a bit of “baking” now and then.

Who are some of your favourite artists?
Howard Finster, Tom Gauld, Lawrence Stephen Lowry, Henry Darger, David Hockney, Bruce Brickford, Robert Crumb, Aubrey Beardsley and Hieronymus Bosch to mention a very few.

Are there any particular things that inspire your work?
Monsters, swamps, haunted houses, mist, the unknown, mutants, forests, sorcery, paranoia, professors, melting mountains, eyes, peasants, veins, telecommunication, etc.

You’ve just had a solo show at Wolves Cafe in JHB. How’d that go?
It was great to have the opportunity to show in Johannesburg. The guys over at Wolves were really nice, and everything went pretty smooth. The work i put up consisted of some projects i had done previously in the year as well some new drawings and art objects. Considering the type of space, I wanted to put up work that is affordable, so prints, books and ornamental type art objects seemed like a good route. I also printed an 8 page newspaper zine called Lunar Fog which i made available for the first time at the show. The response has been great so far, and the show is still up till the end of October.

Can you tell us a bit more about your recent book collaboration with Warren Editions?
I was really exited about the idea of making books. About 2 years ago when Warren Editions approached me about the collaboration, I was on the brink of making a book by myself. So it was great timing, and working with a narrative was something that i wanted to explore for while. Although I was given guidelines concerning the number of pages and dimensions by Warren Editions, they pretty much gave me a blank canvas. Since then i’ve been working on several other stories, in the form of comics and picture books, so if all goes well i’ll be putting out some self published books and things soon.

In this age of blogs, what do you think the relevance is of putting out a printed publication of your work?
Well, printed publications will still be relevant because they will always be the ‘tangible objects’ in which the digital image is in reference to. Even though the internet is a great tool for getting your work seen, there will always be something much more magical and real about experiencing the printed image. Especially when there lies some sort of expression in the format, which goes beyond the the actual image.

One of the problems with internet in this regard, is that we are always sitting behind our computer screen when we look at things. We tend to forget about the invisible ‘powers’ that artworks or printed works posses. I like to think that people look a bit closer when they can hold something in their hands.

Links for people to check out?
http://www.jeandewet.com
http://blog.jeandewet.com/
http://luckypony.co.za/?p=12972