https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Riley: Riley Stearns (Director + Writer) grew up in Pflugerville, Texas.
His short, The Cub, screened at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. His feature debut, Faults, starring Leland Orser, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, premiered at SXSW in 2014 and was released theatrically.
The Art of Self-Defense (2019) played at numerous international film festivals including the opening night slot of Munich Film Festival and was released domestically to critical acclaim. The Art of Self-Defense is Stearns’ second feature.
He is a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu under, Renzo Gracie black belt, Shawn Williams.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/rileystearns/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Akira: “Making pictures is one of the earliest memories I recall. Before learning to write the alphabet I was drawing from my imagination in crayons. And over all the years that followed, there has never been a period where I didn’t continue the practice. I remember for example just after graduating high school and living on my own as a dishwasher with no ambitions in life but to get drunk and high. But when the party was over I would be in the kitchen of a house I didn’t live in, drawing past dawn. Or even when I was a student at the University of California Berkeley, on my way towards a corporate life, having never conceived even the possibility where art could be a profession, I filled my notebooks not with words from lectures, but with sketches of teachers and classmates. And though later I would become a ‘professional artist’, I sometimes look back at such moments if confused with the roots of my creativity. It started purely as an act of autonomy, where nothing outside myself influenced or affected it. I simply drew because I enjoyed it above all else. Sure, like anyone I’ve had plenty of typical life experiences that have brought their own joy, but nothing compares in consistency and meaningfulness that making art has provided. Even during those unavoidable periods with living that challenge us most, drastic life change/loss/death, art has functioned as a medium with giving meaning to suffering, transforming it into an experience with healing. This I hope, begins to describe the art I make. The drawings and paintings you see on this site, are similar to snapshots where the lens points in Life's direction with penetrating force. Every piece reflects a story only Life could tell. Up until my middle twenties it was enough to make art for its own sake. When I discovered making pictures offered so much more in such ways, a journey of exploration began. It’s fascinating to see how far it has come, and continuing forward never knowing where it may go.”
- Akira Beard
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
www.akirabeard.com
https://www.instagram.com/akirabeard/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Jennifer: Jennifer Pochinski is an American figurative painter. Her work is characterized by gestural marks and bold color. Relationships, the male-female power dynamic, and humanity are key themes in her work.
She was raised in Hawaii and received her BFA from the University of Hawaii in Painting in 1991. Much of her young adulthood was spent traveling and living on the mainland USA and Europe. Since late 2010, she has been living and working in California.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/jenniferpochinski/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Kit: Kit Dale was born on January 24, 1986, in Melbourne, Australia, growing up in the area’s eastern suburbs.
During his formative years Dale practiced a number of athletic activities, from karate to inline hockey, as well as Australian football (Aussie rules), a sport he competed in extensively prior to jiu-jitsu.
Australian rules football is widely recognized as one of the most physical sports in the world, generally played by large individuals. Although a very athletic competitor himself, Kit lacked the physicality of some of the other players, a handicap Dale sought to overcome by learning a few grappling tricks, starting his jiu-jitsu training in 2008 with Robert Parmakovski – a man who would, years later, become Kit’s own student.
BJJ came natural to Dale, who soon started allocating more of his time to grappling and less to Aussie rules football. While climbing the ranks of jiu-jitsu Dale trained with Bernie Jenkins (up to blue belt) and Peter De Been (up to brown belt), while also doing plenty of training and experimentation on his own or with friends/students.
Once the highly decorated grappler, Yuri Simões moved to Australia, Kit started training with the Brazilian. The two established a strong relationship as friends and training partners, and it was Yuri who promoted Dale to black belt on June, 2013. At the time of the ceremony, Dale had just under 5 years of training, this being one of the fastest rises to the rank recorded by then.
Dale would later move to California, USA, one of jiu-jitsu’s epicenters in order to improve his grappling skills while also attempting further his acting career.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/kitdaleofficial/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Cory: Cory Allen is an author, podcast host, meditation teacher, composer, and audio engineer. On his podcast The Astral Hustle, he finds ways for us to live with more wonder and less suffering by speaking with leading experts in mindfulness, neuroscience, music, and philosophy. The Astral Hustle has been downloaded millions of times and was featured by the New York Times. Cory has taught thousands of people how to meditate with clear and concise methods in his online meditation course Release Into Now. He is also a distinguished music producer who has released more than a dozen albums and engineered hundreds of records for other artists. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/heycoryallen/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Adam: Recurring themes in the work of Adam Lee are the act of pilgrimage, shelter and an itinerant, nomadic sense of home. Transmitted through a community of hermits, shawl-shod women and regalia-laden gentlefolk traversing deserts, forests and valleys or reposing in tabernacles or dreamed abodes, Lee’s practice ties together narratives of memory, imagination and transcendence. Through his works on linen and paper, Lee builds worlds where allegory and atmosphere coalesce to suggest a highly personal outlook informed by collective folklore and legend. These interior histories find their physical manifestation in Lee’s varied but self-contained technique, which is characterised by mercurial landscapes and a contemporary tenebrism. His oils on linen are a resonant amalgam of sanded back layers of pigment, highly saturated sfumato and a sensitively deployed portraiture, with his watercolour ink works evincing a command of shaping ethereal blooms into impressions of externalised thoughts, sensations and calls to a higher being.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/adamlee79/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Alex: Alex Kanevsky was born in Russia in 1963. He studied mathematics at Vilnius University in Lithuania before coming to the United States. After his arrival to Philadelphia in 1983 he worked as Russian translator, illustrator at the Psychiatric Nursing Magazine and drew pictures for the telephone book advertisements. After attending PAFA (1989-93) and winning a Pew Fellowship (1997) he devoted himself to painting full time. Alex Kanevsky lives and works in New Hampshire. He has exhibited his work in the United States, Canada, Italy, UK, France and Ireland. His work is represented by Hollis Taggart in New York and Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco.
Show Notes:
https://www.instagram.com/somepaintings/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Joe: Joe Goddard is a British musician, songwriter, and DJ. He is best known as a member in the English synth-pop band Hot Chip, which he co-founded with Alexis Taylor. In 2007, he co-founded record label Greco-Roman, which has produced albums by artists such as Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and Disclosure. Goddard is also a member of electronica group The 2 Bears, and produced two solo albums, Harvest Festival (2009) and Electric Lines (2017).
https://www.instagram.com/hot.chip/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Alexis: Alexis Marshall is the singer of the band Daughters.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About David Kassan: Raw, poignant and profoundly honest, David Jon Kassan’s work aesthetically captures humanity in its true form. As an artist, Kassan acts as an empathetic intermediary between the subject he portrays and the viewer. More than simply replicating his subjects Kassan seeks to understand them. He seeks to capture the essence of those he paints, imbuing them with their own voice. They communicate with the viewer interpersonally and we see them through our own eyes. Our gaze transcends the picture plane and permeates deep into the subject’s psyche. We are moved by Kassan’s depictions, captivated by powerfully expressive hands, pensive faces, and flesh that appears warm to touch. Kassan’s portraits pulsate with the lives of his sitters – the weighty streams-of-consciousness of past experiences, feeling and introspection.This is what reality means to Kassan – preserving the realness of nuanced emotion and expression emanatingfrom the people he paints. Kassan’s technical mastery of oil paint combined with adept draftsmanship enables him to fluently represent what he sees. This is evident in the stunning flesh tones Kassan achieves. Transparent layers of oil paint are built up, forming an intricate lattice of veins, blood and skin. Through this light enters and is reflected back, infusing the subject with veridical luminosity. We can also sense movement and life beneath the undulating creases and folds of clothing. It is the artist’s intent to control the medium of oil paint so that it is not part of the viewer to subject equation. Kassan facilitates an interface between subject and viewer with which he is conscious not to interfere. The technical aspect of his work is thus a means to an end; an end rooted in the viewer’s experience.We find inherent contradictions in Kassan’s work as it oscillates between representation and transformation, reality and abstraction.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/davidkassan/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Antrese: Antrese Wood is an artist and the host of the Savvy Painter Podcast. The Savvy Painter features interviews with top artists who talk about their mindset, process, and gives tips and techniques to aspiring painters. Antrese paints and teaches online workshops from her home in Argentina.
A painter herself, Antrese left her job art directing video games at the Walt Disney Company to focus exclusively on her art. She lived in Argentina for six years where she created a Kickstarter campaign for her painting project, A Portrait of Argentina. She and her husband spent two years driving from the jungles to the glaciers as she painted her way across the country. Check out her paintings at antrese.com.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/savvypainterpodcast/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Hollis: Hollis Heichemer was born in Binghamton, New York and now currently lives and works in New Hampshire. Heichemer’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Hollis Taggart Galleries and J. Cacciola Gallery in New York, and Gross McCleaf Gallery and Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia . Hollis has participated in a wide range of group exhibitions, including most recently at Stanek Gallery in Philadelphia and Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco. She received her BS from Ohio University and her MA at Seton Hall University.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/hahike/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Maja: Maja Ruznic, a prolific and active artist, is primarily a painter, a storyteller who conjures form and narrative from ground up mineral, smeared oil, and stained canvas. Born in Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1983, Ruznic immigrated to the United States with her family in 1995, settling on the West Coast where she eventually went on to study at the University of California, Berkeley, later receiving an MFA from the California College of Arts. Ruznic’s often-quoted biography – a refugee who escaped the Bosnian War – is only the beginning of her journey. Ruznic’s vivid paintings speak for themselves, depicting figures that seem to emerge from the caverns of human history, from within their own supports, and somehow from within the viewer’s own recollections. These paintings breach something intrinsically human and Ruznic guides us deftly with dark humor and complex representations, not dissimilar to Werner Herzog’s wry, but poignant 3-D documentary depicting the oldest painted images in the world. Ruznic has exhibited internationally and her work has been written about extensively, most notably in ArtMaze Magazine, Juxtapoz, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Studio Visit Magazine, and twice in New American Paintings, including the cover as selected by curator Anne Ellegood. In 2018, Ruznic was a recipient of the Hopper Prize and in 2019, Ruznic’s painting “Azmira’s Daughters” was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2020, she has upcoming solo shows with Conduit Gallery in Dallas, TX and Hales Gallery in London.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/majaruz/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Josh: Josh Peck is an American actor, voice actor, comedian, and YouTube personality. Peck began his career as a child actor in the late 90s and early 2000s, and had an early role on The Amanda Show from 2000 to 2002. Peck rose to prominence for the role of Josh Nichols alongside Drake Bell's character in the Nickelodeon sitcom Drake & Josh from 2004 to 2007, and in its two television films in 2006 and 2008.
He then acted in films such as Mean Creek (2004), Drillbit Taylor (2008), The Wackness (2008), ATM (2012), Red Dawn (2012), Battle of the Year (2013), Danny Collins (2015), and Take the 10 (2017). Peck provided the voice of Eddie in the Ice Age franchise since Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), and voiced Casey Jones in the Nickelodeon animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012–2017). He also starred with John Stamos in the Fox comedy series Grandfathered (2015–2016). In 2017, Peck started a comedic lifestyle YouTube channel, Shua Vlogs, featuring David Dobrik and his wife Paige O'Brien.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/shuapeck/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Josh: Joshua Hagler lived and worked in San Francisco and then Los Angeles for fifteen years before moving to rural New Mexico in late 2017 as a grant recipient of the year-long Roswell Artist in Residence Program. He was born at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho in 1979 and is a first-generation college graduate with a visual communications degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Having not attended an art school or received an MFA, Hagler refers to himself as a working class artist. Not a stranger to class bias in the art world, self-directed research and travel has underpinned Hagler’s career and is essential to how the artist integrates creative influences with his life experience.
While most of Hagler’s early work responded directly to a difficult past within a variety of religious groups and their unspoken implications for the artist and his family, the later work has sought to understand religion in a deeper way. To Hagler’s mind, one finds the seeds of religion in every facet of culture, even, and, perhaps especially, among the so-called secular realms. Religion, for Hagler, is not approached in the pejorative but in a state of acceptance that perhaps it’s through the religious structures inherent in our shared languages and cultures that we access what makes us most human, for better and for worse.
Currently, he is hard at work in the studio preparing for his first U.K. solo exhibition with Unit London. In “Chimera,” Hagler presents a body of new paintings that attempt to dig beneath various forms of loud political language, including censorship, for clues on how the ubiquity of groupthink informs populist world views on both ends of the spectrum. The artist, in practice, hopes to work into the “noise” to exhume something Other in the physical manner in which the work is made.
2018 saw two museum shows at the Brand Library and Art Center in Los Angeles and the Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico entitled “The River Lethe” and “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded” respectively. He has exhibited paintings, sculpture, video, and animation in galleries and museums in North and South America, Europe, and Australia, including a long list of solo exhibitions. Reviews and features about the work have appeared in a variety of publications and media outlets in the U.S. and Europe.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Daniel: Daniel Martin (1982) lives and works in Leiden, the Netherlands. In his current work he searches for the transmutational properties of matter. The portraits and sculptures do not have a definite form and posses different realities on how they can be perceived. In order to come to new forms Daniel cuts up paintings, finds things on the street and uses creations made by others. The loose elements from these endeavors are used as disjointed brushstrokes that are reassembled in coherent shapes again, creating an object which holds no truth in shape.
His work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include, the national museum of revolution, Cuba; Duo Phillip Akkerman, Sis Josip Gallery, Den Haag; Havana Biënnale (collaboration with Karang (Karina Alonso); Forma prima, El pez soluble Gallery, Mexico; Bloom, Booth Gallery, New York.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/daniel_martin_art/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Mia: Mia Bergeron is a contemporary female oil painter focused on the dualism of everyday scenes. Rooted in her upbringing in New York City with continuous exposure to modern art at a young age, her paintings also reveal her choice to study classical painting in Florence, Italy. Throughout her work, influences of both contemporary and historical ideas can be seen, whether rooted by her choice of subjects or the exploratory nature of the tools she employs. Her work seeks to show the nebulous aspects of being human, often choosing to pose a question rather than pursue an answer.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/miabergeron/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Christian: Christian Rex van Minnen was born in Providence, RI in 1980 and received his BA from Regis University, Denver in 2002. He has exhibited throughout the US and internationally and was recently awarded an Artist-in-Residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, CO (Fall, 2017).
Recent exhibitions include con-figuration, a group exhibit at Postmasters, NY, Juxtapoz x Superflat, co-curated by Takashi Murakami & Evan Pricco at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada and Enantiodromia a solo show at Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Public Collections include: Denver Art Museum, Djurhuus Collection, The Christine & Andy Hall Collection, Colección Solo, and the Richard B. Sachs Collection. van Minnen currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Johan: Born in 1959, Johan Van Mullem lives and works in Belgium.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/johanvanmullem/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Zoey: Zoey Frank (b. 1987, Boulder, CO) received her MFA in painting from Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach, California after studying for four years with Juliette Aristides in the Classical Atelier at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, Washington. She is represented by Danese/Corey Gallery in New York City, and Galerie Mokum in Amsterdam. She has received numerous honors and awards, including three Elizabeth Greenshields grants, the Avigdor Arikha Memorial International Residency Scholarship, the Artist’s Magazine All Media Competition Grand Prize of 2012, the Hudson River Fellowship in 2012, and scholarships from the Albert K. Murray Foundation, the Stacey Foundation, and the Art Renewal Center. Her work has been featured in publications such as Fine Art Connoisseur, American Art Collector, the International Artist Magazine, Artist’s Magazine, and Southwest Art. She lives and works in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Topics Discussed In This Podcast:
https://www.instagram.com/zoeyfrank/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
AD Non-Weekly Round Up #6 with Yoshino and AD co-host Saman Kesh.
Topics Discussed:
www.artistdecoded.com
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Yumi: YUMI SAKUGAWA is an Ignatz Awards nominated comic book artist and the author of I THINK I AM IN FRIEND-LOVE WITH YOU and YOUR ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO BECOMING ONE WITH THE UNIVERSE. Her comics have also appeared in The Believer, Bitch, the Best American NonRequired Reading 2014, The Rumpus, Folio, Fjords Review, and other publications. She has also exhibited multimedia installations at the Japanese American National Museum and the Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building. A graduate from the fine art program of University of California, Los Angeles, she lives in Los Angeles.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
https://www.instagram.com/yumisakugawa/
https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Nikolaus: Nikolaus Summerer is a German Director of Photography based in Berlin. He is most well known for his award winning cinematography on the Netflix hit series DARK. He lensed the first two seasons as sole Cinematographer, and is currently busy filming the third and final season.
DARK is the most recent of several projects Nikolaus has filmed with director and showrunner Baran bo Odar; a relationship stretching back to their Munich film school days. Following their graduate film “Unter der Sonne” (Under The Sun) they collaborated on two feature films (The Silence and Who Am I) before DARK. “Who Am I” earned Nikolaus the German Cinematography Award, after which he filmed “The Siege of Jadotville”, starring Jamie Dornan and Mark Strong.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
Nikolaus Summerer is a German Director of Photography based in Berlin. He is most well known for his award winning cinematography on the Netflix hit series DARK. He lensed the first two seasons as sole Cinematographer, and is currently busy filming the third and final season.
DARK is the most recent of several projects Nikolaus has filmed with director and showrunner Baran bo Odar; a relationship stretching back to their Munich film school days. Following their graduate film “Unter der Sonne” (Under The Sun) they collaborated on two feature films (The Silence and Who Am I) before DARK. “Who Am I” earned Nikolaus the German Cinematography Award, after which he filmed “The Siege of Jadotville”, starring Jamie Dornan and Mark Strong.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
www.artistdecoded.com
Jerry Hsu is an American professional skateboarder and photographer.
His newest photography book entitled “The Beautiful Flower Is The World”, depicts his fascination with life’s absurdities and showcases Hsu’s humorous approach to image making.
Show Notes: