Having worked with numerous exciting creatives, in everything from animation to art direction and design, self-confessed ‘giant nerd’ JONATHAN ZAWADA has completed a deck for the I Used To Skate Once exhibition. INFORMER discovers a little more about the man behind the image.

INFORMER: Your name’s synonymous with inspiring and interesting art and design – has art always been a part of your life? How did you get to this point in your career?

JONATHAN ZAWADA: I’ve loved drawing and making things for about as long as I can remember and really my whole life has just been one big, long continuum of drawing and making things. At some point in high school I started getting paid for making stuff like t-shirts and logos for friends and once I started making things on the computer – like websites and animations – I just sort of found myself inside of a career. For a long while I saw myself as being a straight graphic designer and its only been in recent years that that role has sort of expanded to encompass illustration which I always used to treat as being more of a hobby and something I did for myself outside of work hours.

I: What’s the greatest disaster you have ever encountered in regards to the art you make?

JZ: For my first exhibition at Monster Children Gallery in Sydney I produced a seven metre long, one metre wide drawing on a single sheet of paper. Because we didn’t have much space in our apartment to work in I was drawing it on the tiny dining room table and had to set up a system of chairs that this long piece of paper was suspended over the top of. I had been working on it for about three weeks and had only about one meter left to draw when my cat decided to go crazy – as cats do – and he sprinted along the top of the drawing on the table and then tried to run along the top of the paper that was suspended over the chairs. Of course it didn’t suspend his weight and he put a few claw holes and creases throughout the middle section and smudged various patches of this giant drawing that had already become a task of endurance anyway. Somehow I managed to press it, patch it and redraw it to a passable state, but at the time I felt like my entire world had collapsed around me to the point that I couldn’t even really get mad about it.

I: Where is the strangest/coolest place that your art has ended up? Was it deliberate or accidental?

JZ: Lately I’ve been discovering quite of my illustrations – all commercial ones too – that people have had made into tattoos. I find that a really, really weird thing, that somebody will have something on their body for their entire life that I probably only spent a couple of hours thinking about and in some cases have kind of forgotten I even drew in the first place. Definitely the weirdest ones are this image of a skull I drew for The Presets first EP cover – to me that image is so attached to the band that it’s just bizarre that some person would have it 15cm wide on their shoulder blade.

I: I see band references on your website to artists like Wire and New Order – what is it you take away from these acts, and what are some of your other favoured sources of cultural inspiration?

JZ: Despite the adage of not judging a book by its cover, I’ve uncovered a lot of music and musicians by being intrigued by their cover art. There’s something about really good cover art that instantly creates a sense of a whole universe behind it that the band lives in – that the cover is kind of an artefact or a key to decrypting their music and their world. Through becoming musically important their iconography and visual language in turn gets folded into a broader cultural history and the images become imbued with meanings that independently spread out into the wide world of visual language. That’s one thing I guess I find quite interesting and inspiring in pieces of design rather than pieces of art – they are forced to engage with a wider world and they are in turn always a part of that broader world. They aren’t and shouldn’t ever be treated with reverence but the good stuff of design somehow manages to make that happen for itself – that because of the decoration stuck on it alone the object contains far more value than it intrinsically has otherwise.

I: What challenges still lay out there for you and the work you do? Is there anything you’re yet to tackle art-wise?

JZ: There’s still a tonne of stuff I want to do both personally and professionally. I don’t feel like I’ve really even begun to explore anything from a proper artistic perspective, especially in terms of my personal work. I feel like I’m slowly getting rid of the extra unnecessary layers of style and aesthetics that are kind of clouding up my ideas and hopefully one day far off in the future I’ll get to the core of it. At the moment though I’m really enjoying making the most of all of the opportunities I’ve got and if I could continue on indefinitely getting to work with creative musicians, fashion designers and artists the way I have been over the past few years then I don’t think I could possibly wish for a better life.

I: When were you first exposed to skating, and in what way has this influenced your work for I Used To Skate Once…?

JZ: I never skated as a kid and it wasn’t until I was 20 that I tried to learn, mostly just to prove to myself that I could still learn new things. I only ever managed to barely skate a mini ramp and to get around on the street and that was about the extent of my development as a skater but for me – a giant nerd all through school – that was a big achievement! There is something pure and honest about the culture of skateboarding that is really inspiring and motivating though and I think that energy is contagious.

JONATHAN ZAWADA joins over 50 artists in I Used To Skate Once 5, opening at The Zoo from 6pm on Thursday Jun 25. Secret Birds, Kirin J. Callinan & Stemford Hiss play on the night. www.skateonce.blogspot.com / www.zawada.com.au

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