Interview Fragments
Autobiographical
I love fiction. Getting to make up stuff without having to cater to fact is the best. Even when I do self-portraits they are for the most part tales of fiction. I love being the outsider to the stories in my artwork and getting to ask the same questions any viewer might. That being said, I think every artist’s work is at least somewhat autobiographical by nature.
For my novel Slingshot, however, I did draw heavily on own experiences as a teenager. The story remains fiction, but the only way it was going to feel authentic was for me to really embed myself back into the mental landscape of 16-year-old me. And that was the whole point: to write a brutally honest remembrance of falling in love for the first time. So it’s the most autobiographical thing I’ve done and at the same time totally fictitious.
Film I got a camcorder when I was about fourteen and began to film everything pretty much all the time. I’ve never really stopped filming stuff since then and have a massive archive of video footage — most of which hasn’t been used professionally for anything and maybe never will.
With my art shows, I started making films as an extension to my drawings/paintings. I was doing mainly pencil drawings at the time, and it felt very necessary to have another element involved that took the show a little further. In the films there were suddenly so many more layers to work with. Getting to work with music was another big kid-in-a-candy-store moment, and luckily my brother Ali is a composer. For my 2013 show in LA we made the Cops/Nurses films.
Art versus Writing
As a kid I drew, made films and wrote stories. So, none of these things are something new that I'm suddenly doing as an adult. I always found it easier to focus on a bunch of stuff artistically rather than just one thing because there's a lot of cross-inspiration that goes on. One thing generates ideas for something else, and different channels of artistic expression are better suited for different ideas. When I get stuck in one project, I can switch to the other. The only times I feel lost is when I'm not actively getting something done. It's the worst feeling for me, and so I set things up to make sure that I always have a writing project going besides my studio work. There is also something about the back and forth between the explicit nature of dealing with words, and then switching to a completely visual creative outlet.
Novels I desperately love writing. I think you'd have to feel pretty strongly about it in order to go through some of the terrible lows that come with writing something like a novel. I love words and language. A good idiom can really make my day. I love the humor and creativity of “bad language”. I love the amount of work that I have to deliver in order to put together a novel. I love that I can't fake it and that when I'm done I have no clue how the hell that ended up being a finished thing.
Gottfried Helnwein
It was never my dream to follow in my dad’s footsteps and become a visual artist professionally. I wanted to be a writer. But I was always drawing non-stop and addicted to it for as long as I can remember. After I moved to LA I ended up doing art shows with friends and selling work and being able to pay rent and buy food that way. I would have been doing art regardless of whatever else I might have ended up doing in an alternate reality, but the reason I fell into it as a career was because initially it enabled me to survive. And then, yeah, it became a bigger and bigger necessity to me in terms of keeping my sanity. I can’t imagine not doing this professionally anymore.
I'm very close to both my parents, but my dad has never gotten involved with what I do. And although his work was around me all the time as I grew up and I soaked in inspiration from him that way, there was never any direct influence from him. We have completely different artistic urges and subject matters that involve us. He's never given me lessons in drawing or painting, and the actual technical advice he gave me I can count on one hand. I really liked being left alone in terms of figuring out my style. I stayed away from art schools too for this reason.
I don't talk to my dad at length about my work. He doesn't give me critiques or opinions. I really appreciate that about him, because he gives you full leeway to be who you are as an artist. We talk a lot about art in general though. Other artists, music, writers, old architecture, and so on. Those are really inspiring conversations to me and have far more profound effects on me than someone actually trying to discuss the details of my own work. My dad’s viewpoints are incredibly broad and fascinating. I’m always surprised at how he sees art. And that’s why going through a museum with him is a very different experience for me than going by myself. I get so much more out of it with him.
