On the pitfalls of saying yes to everything

Tell me about your journey from music to art.

I knew I wanted to be an artist from a weirdly young age. By preschool, I was dead set on either being an artist or a professional soccer player. Art was always a definite, there was no other option. It was either be an artist or die. I couldn’t really see myself having a normal career.

I started taking classes at The Art Students League when I was about six. I have dyscalculia so I really struggled in school and I didn’t want to go to a traditional four-year college. I wanted to go to a school where the only thing I have to do is paint and draw.

I ended up applying to FIT and going into textile design because I started to get cold feet about my ability to be an artist at all. I was concerned about how self-promoting you need to be to be a fine artist, and how I wasn’t ready, mature, able at that age to find success as a fine art portrait painter.

I was so painfully shy and introverted that I was like, “Who am I even going to paint? I can’t even ask someone to be my model. How am I going to do this?” So I was pursuing something more practical with textile design.

FIT is not the most normal college. Going to FIT did teach me how to work or how I could be a working artist rather than just making art for fun. Art is a business at the end of the day. Art is something you’re called to do, but everyone needs to find a way to live. If you want to be an artist, you do have to understand the practical aspects of being an artist.

How did you go from fine artist to musician for Frankie Cosmos?

While I was at FIT, my friend Greta, who is Frankie Cosmos, was doing this music project. At the time it was already fairly popular and I was a fan. Greta wanted a full-time keyboard player. I didn’t play keyboard but Greta and I grew up playing music together. We always wrote songs together for fun.

She ended up asking me if I would do it, and I was like, “Yes, but I need to finish school first just because this was my second attempt at going to college, and I can’t keep not graduating.”

Before joining the band, I was learning all these cool things in school about screen printing. Why don’t I also make the merch for your tours that I can’t go on? I’ll just print it at school for free.

I was starting to think of my art in a different way. Making a painting is such a different form of expression than making a t-shirt. When you’re making a painting, you shouldn’t be thinking about, “Who would buy this?” It was just a cosmic pull. Uncontrollable urge. But with screen printing a t-shirt, it was not an urge. It was like a need. It’s like: “We need t-shirts because t-shirts on tour are what pay for gas and food.”

It was a commercial need. It was a really different way of wrapping my brain around creating an image. It was not something that was a subconscious brain-hand connection. It was thinking about the lyrics and thinking about the audience and thinking about color limitations and cost limitations. It was rearranging my art brain. I realized I liked the limitations in a weird way because it made me focus.

Forcing myself to do black and white line work drawings after years of doing complicated, realistic oil portraits of my friends and family was a huge leap. The simplicity was really satisfying because it was more like what I was drawing as a kid.

After I joined the band full time in 2016, I had originally planned on graduating and getting a job as a textile designer. That plan changed because we were touring six months out of the year. I was like, “Maybe I’ll just do this for a year or two and then just go back to reality.”

One year became two, two years became three, and then eventually it had been five years of touring full time. And then the pandemic happened. During all those five years, I was designated merch designer. I didn’t do all the album covers but I did a couple. I was just trying different things out, trying different things out, trying to see, trying to find my voice as an artist. It felt very jumbled up.

When did you make the leap into illustration?

I didn’t really know what an illustrator was. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing as an artist either. I was in a confused, angsty moment in my art practice because I was feeling like I’m not an artist anymore. I’m only a musician and I just make the merch for our band because I have no time to make any other art except for t-shirts that say Frankie Cosmos on it. For years, the only art I made was Frankie Cosmos merch, which was great, but I didn’t feel like an artist for a long time.

It felt like I wasn’t aligning with my purpose. I felt very grateful I was getting to travel the world and meet all these people and do all these amazing things and play for fans that knew all the lyrics. It was an incredible experience. But at the end of the day, I’m an artist and I’m not getting to make my art. I was just like, “Why do I not feel quite right?”

Two key turning points happened during this time.

One was when our band toured with another band called Squarehead. The drummer—Ruan van Vliet—is an illustrator. At the time, I was keeping this little journal. I wasn’t really sketching much in it but I was keeping wristbands and taping them in and plane tickets and cool packaging from a foreign soda or just whatever I saw.

Ruan drew a really fun cartoon of some cartoon characters of breakfast foods in it. Obviously, it wasn’t like a groundbreaking thing, but it was groundbreaking for me. I was like, “I should be an illustrator. What am I doing?”

It all clicked meeting another illustrator who was doing it. I hadn’t felt empowered to go outside of making merch for my own band. The pandemic made it so all of our tours were canceled. When they were canceled, I was like, well, “I guess I’m going to try to be an illustrator right now.” And I just started.

Having time for the first time in five years to think about anything but touring gave me energy to think about where I would want to see my work and also to put together a little bit of a cohesive portfolio. Drawings I made, not just for the band at that point, but making art for the sake of it, drawing in this new style I’d been working on, just drawing whatever I felt like. I put a portfolio together. I had already done some light reconnaissance to find the names of some art directors at different publications across the country who were hiring illustrators, who I felt whose work at the time was inspiring my work. I would find these people’s names and try and find their emails—seeing if when you type it into Gmail, if it clicks into place and it’s like, yes, that’s a real email. I would send them a very simple website with 10 pieces of art on it. And a link to my Instagram, which was really sparse at the time. I didn’t have much, but I had started working on a few things.

What was the other turning point?

In February of 2020, my aunt in Jamaica was having a book launch. It was right when things were like, “I wonder if this pandemic is going to be bad.” And everyone was like, “I don’t know, but we’re having fun at this party.”

My uncle, who is a wonderful but crotchety old British man, had one too many. I was having this really weird shift in my whole life and he just caught me at the exact right time. He was like, “You’re such a good artist, but you draw such stupid stuff. Your art means nothing.”

Obviously I was really hurt by it at first and then I was like, “He’s totally right.” The things I was drawing and posting on my Instagram I felt so disconnected to. I was having a hard time connecting with any subject matter. My world was in flux, my heart was in flux. I couldn’t really figure it out. I took it as: I can still draw stupid things, but I should induce some humor, meaning, connection into it.

Flash forward a month later in March, I was like, maybe I can write some hopeful messages or create some sort of artwork that makes people feel less afraid of this horrible moment. So I was drawing these PSAs about keeping safe or keeping connected or staying positive, and those were the first drawings that I was getting some attention for.

I felt finally like I’m onto something here. My style, the messaging, the way I feel about the art is all meshing coming together in this way I was struggling to figure it out for a long time.

I think I’m good at making–honestly, this sounds corny as hell, but–art that’s uplifting and makes people happy. Figuring out my characters could bring joy in that way was really fueling me at the time. And I was extremely prolific, which helped. I was sitting, drawing all day, posting stuff on Instagram, hoping any of the art directors that I had emailed weeks would get back to me.

My first ever editorial job was with the LA Times for an opinion piece about getting fully dressed to work from home in the very beginning of the pandemic. I remember everyone was so pissed off. It was this huge Twitter shitstorm of people being really mad at this article, but obviously on Twitter, when you share an article, the artwork is what you see.

That is when my career took off. I wasn’t even thinking of it as a career yet. Then it fully turned into a full-time job. I was like, “Oh, I’m actually an illustrator now full-time.”

I was working a lot and doing a ton of stuff, high off the attention in a weird way. There’s something very intoxicating about blowing up on social media. It happens to more and more people these days with TikTok and Instagram making people who are just normal people into minor internet celebrities. It was really, really fun, but it was also really, really stressful. I was posting a lot of what was on my mind at the time, an intense time on earth. I was maybe posting a little bit more political stuff, and it’s when you’re blowing up that you’re getting a lot of backlash too.

What about your relationship to social media now?

I’m so sick of being online. I just don’t feel like I need to work myself to the bone with commercial work, editorial work and personal work and posting, posting and posting.

My work is out there enough that I don’t need to grind so constantly and so hard to keep getting jobs, which I’m incredibly thankful to have a little bit of rest. I still am so busy all the time, which I mean in a good way, but also a bad way. It is hard to balance your day as a freelancer. I do have a wonderful agency I work with who’s extremely helpful but I want to say yes to everything, and then I’m like, “Why did I say yes to everything?”

How do you balance everything apart from the agency? Do you still do your music?

Unfortunately, I left the band two years ago. I couldn’t see touring with the workload I currently have. I would’ve been stressed out of my mind. It just wasn’t feasible, and I felt I had to choose one or the other. And unfortunately, the band, just because it’s so much harder physically, mentally, the constant travel, different city every day, I was like, well, I think working from home and drawing my cartoons is a more sustainable lifestyle for me at this point.

I also started experiencing some health problems. I was diagnosed with celiac disease and rheumatoid arthritis. My body is telling me not to tour like that anymore. It’s hard because I think that grinding mentality of tour has stuck with me and I keep myself busy to the point of exhaustion. I don’t know when I’ll learn the lesson, but hopefully one day.

What are your rituals of rest?

I don’t have them. I am not resting. It’s really bad because I do need to rest. My doctors are like, “You need to rest.” And I’m like, “I’ll rest when I’m dead.” It’s bad.

I have a fiery energy, which is funny because I was so shy growing up and introverted. Rage isn’t the right word because positive rage, if you know what I mean?

Sometimes it can be negative. It’s more like I have a very gung-ho attitude about everything. I want to do everything and I want to experience everything, but I’m also chronically ill and tired all the time. It’s this battle between my body and my mind of saying yes to everything.

I say yes, I do the thing, and then I’m just so pooped. Finding the balance has been really hard for me. I have struggled for years and years and years. Let’s do another interview in five years and I’ll update you on my resting and healing practices because I do not have them yet. I’m open to suggestions. I’ve got massage therapists and acupuncturists who are like, “You really need to slow down.” I’m like, “I don’t know how. I don’t have the tools.”

I’m the same way. Trying to maximize as much as I can out of every single day, squeeze every single drop. And I think rage gets a bad rep. I saw a quote once that was like: “I thought it was anger, but it was feral joy.” I’ve always loved that.

I’ve got a lot of feral joy. A frustrating part of it is a lot of that feral joy is getting used on projects that aren’t sparking the passion in me because they’re just collaborations with brands. I’m glad for the opportunity. I’m glad for the money. But it’s not a passion project for me. I’ve got a lot of this energy that just feels displaced sometimes and I haven’t found the right balance of personal practice to work to rest.

I’m still quite new to this. I’ve been doing it for five years, but for a lot of that five years, I was really figuring it out. 2020 was the year I became an illustrator, and it’s the year I think my career blew up at the same time. I was learning everything as I was going. I was flying by the seat of my pants. I haven’t given myself the time and space to sit back and be like, “Okay, I’ve done all this stuff. Now I need to go back a little bit to my personal practice to not have this rage, passion, energy buildup that has nowhere to go.” I don’t need to put my whole soul into a t-shirt for a brand. But it’s hard not to when I don’t have another outlet right now because I’m so busy and there’s only so many hours in the day.

At TCI, we really think about this concept of a spiral a lot. It sounds like one of your spirals is every five years you reach an existential crisis like, “I’m not making the art that I want to make.”

I’ve been really feeling it and I’ve been thinking of ways to get out of the current. I’m not even in a bad place. I’m actually in quite a good place. I feel a little bit stuck.

I need a new fresh outlook. You’re catching me at an exact moment where it’s like, this is a snapshot of a moment, but it’s going to be quite different soon. I’m feeling the winds of change really strongly.