Kiersten Essenpreis

If the goal of an image is to make you feel something, to evoke emotion, then Kiersten Essenpreis is one of the best damn painters alive today.  Seriously.

Hailing from the suburbs of Chicago, Kiersten now lives in Brooklyn.  And we're so fucking proud to be able to have her as one of our own.








Chief Magazine: The Chicago Art Institute is a big school... you took some classes there but decided to get away and come to Pratt in New York.


Kiersten Essenpreis: I took classes at the Art Institute in high school, but it was one of those things where I thought, ”I’m moving to New York never coming back!” [laughing] I actually went to Pratt’s extension campus in Utica. It’s a two-year program and I figured I’d save money by going there, but there were about 30 kids in the school. It just wasn’t what I expected, so I transferred to Pratt Brooklyn.

Were you always into Illustration?

Yeah. Well in Utica they only had fine arts available so I was a painting major there. When I got to Brooklyn, however, I was more into illustration. There was more abstract stuff going on and I had taken a couple illustration courses in high school, so that’s what I was drawn to.

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So much of your work is focused on childhood. Did you start when you were a kid? Were you that little kid who was constantly drawing?

Yeah, totally. I was the stereotype. Always drawing [laughing]. I was also making little books or doing something narrative like making up stories and illustrating them. So I think that’s definitely where my interest came from.

So what do you think of the idea of “art school”? Is it sort of an oxymoron, or was school something that was really important for you?

I looked at a lot of different schools, but they were all art schools. Since high school I had always focused on Pratt, mostly because of the location and after seeing brochures of the campus. For me, art school was the only thing I wanted to do. It was kind of a shock going from high school and being the only kid that does art to college where everyone is that same kind of outcast, artsy person from their own local town. That was a hard adjustment. You go from being the best, like the big fish in a little pond, and then you come to a place where everyone is just as good as you or better. That was a huge adjustment, but I’m glad I went through that.

Stereotypically the art kids, at least in high school, are the weirdos. Were you a weirdo? A lot of your work seems to come across as being about childhood discomfort or nervousness. Is that coming from personal experience?

I kind of always had a social phobia of being in large social situations, and that’s pretty much everything from middle school on. I had a couple really close friends and I was really close with my older brother. That was pretty much it, so if I was an outcast I didn’t really realize it. I was kind of in my own world. I also knew I wasn’t staying there, so I was sort of projecting myself into the future thinking, “Well this is just temporary.”

So when you graduated, how did you find your footing?

Um, I think I'm still working on that... [laughing] I had two really good instructors while I was in school. One of them was Jordan Issip. He curated a lot of shows and kind of pulled me in. They were big group shows but they really helped a lot. I would get shows or work out of those. I was doing those when I was still in school so I got out and was, like, “Well this is gonna be easy…I’ll send some promo cards and it’ll all work out.” But it’s a lot harder than that, of course. That fall and winter happened to be really full of work. Then summer came, and there was nothing. No work.  Not even emails. And I ended up babysitting. And I thought to myself, “I graduated from college, I’ve had all these different jobs, but here I am, like, 13 again.” But I think that’s where I took a step back and realized that this wasn’t going to be easy. The reality sets in after a while. It was good. It was eye opening.

It seems to happen like that more times than not; just when you’re starting to coast and get a little bit full of yourself, life can turn around and hand you a piece of your ass.

Oh yeah totally. I never thought I was gonna be a huge super star, but I had jobs and I was sure I would be able to make a living. But then when your rent and all your bills are coming in, you’re like, “Shit I gotta do something.” There are still those rare occasions where you find yourself having rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and that’s a very humbling experience to say the least.

You’ve been in a few shows, but you also work as a commercial illustrator. How do you approach the two? Do you change how you handle it? Do you think of them as separate?

Most of the work that I do for myself is the stuff that gets me hired, but to me they look completely different. The stuff that I do for editorial is completely art directed, easier to read, and tamer. I never get hired because of other editorial work that I do. And they always want me to recreate things for them, but it's stuff on computers. I just did an article on asexuality [laughing] and they always just want me to transfer what I do onto this certain idea. It’s a challenge. It’s not me putting down whatever I want, but I do try to work in whatever I'm really into at the time. I'll try to interject that somewhere.

It's interesting that you say people see your personal work and hire you from that, but then they get something that’s your work and say it's inevitably too wild or too ambiguous. The individual art director trusts that he’s smart enough to get your work, but doesn’t his mass audience to get it so they end up dumbing it down.

Oh yeah. They’ll art direct until it's back to what they think it should be. So it’s just like, “Tell me straight up what you want and I'll do it.” But the work that I show in my portfolio is mostly my own work. Editorial is mixed in occasionally. They always ask me to emulate something that I did for myself, never the stuff I do to get paid. But then I do that and they say, “yeah our readers aren’t gonna get that.” I blame it on the editors. I’ve had so many jobs killed half-way through 'cause the editors say absolutely no way. It's 50% of my jobs. The editors are the ones that keep dumbing it down.

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I meant to ask you about this before when we were talking about school and all that, but the drawing club you’re part of where you draw once a week, are you still doing that?

Well yeah. A lot of my friends are getting a lot more work than me though [laughing]. It started when were in school. We liked to get together and do work together, but now a lot of my friends moved back to where they came from, so we started doing it over email. Every week we’d get a word of the day and we would do a quick drawing from that. It’s good for just continuing the habit of drawing. But I went through this seven-month phase where I just didn’t do any work at all. It wasn’t writer's block, but I just refused to do anything because I just couldn’t force it out. It felt super ridiculous, but I just couldn’t force it. I would sit down to try to do something and it was just a mess. I wouldn’t do anything unless it was editorial, so I didn’t do the drawing group. Now I'm started to get back into it though. It’s been good. I needed that break. I came back and was able to do a lot of new stuff. We still try to do the drawing group, but a lot of my friends are getting full time work, so it’s died down to like, once a month instead of once a week.

Its really important to continue doing this kind of stuff after school though. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the jobs. You can lose sight of the things that are inspiring, or of the fact that drawing is something that you love to do. It’s also great because you can continue with the dialogue that you had been used to, of being able to show stuff you’re working on or show someone that’s your peer where your heads at and get feedback.

Getting out of school you’re so used to that. Not just critiques, but having to actually work every week and exercising your brain. I think if you don’t do that you can run into fits of not being able to think of anything; just unable to get it out. I think a lot of that comes from getting out of the habit of doing whatever it is that you do everyday. And I'm not one to necessarily sit on the subway and draw all the time. I have a sketchbook that I like to take notes in or write different things down. So for me it’s easy to fall back into that stagnation.

So where do you draw inspiration from? What do you surround yourself with in your studio?

It’s a big mess [laughing]. There are a lot of different things that I gather inspiration from. A lot of it comes from things I see, experiences I've had. But in my studio, in terms of actual things, mostly there are bits and pieces of things that I tack up or a lot of cheap toys around. My mom got me this thing for Christmas one year. She went to a flea market and got this huge box of old advertisements that this old woman, from the time she was 30 up until she died at like 80, would cut out of magazines, categorizing and filing them. My mom said she had boxes and boxes of them. One box would just be ‘women in bathrobes,’ or ‘men smoking pipes.’

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Oh my god.

I know! This woman did all the research I could ever want. My mom didn’t buy all of them because there were just so many. She had stuff all the way back to the 40s. So that is huge for me. I have a library of information. It almost made me want to do it myself. [laughing]

Totally.

It was definitely one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. Other than that, I also have a lot of old pictures, and a lot of bad cheesy B horror movies. I also take from my memories or my parents’ stories. I make lists. I have a lot of lists [laughing].

When you try to remember things from your childhood, you sometimes get flashes of things and wonder, “Was that real? Was that a dream? Was that something I heard from someone else?” It seems like a lot of your work focuses on that ambiguity. Those flashes of something seeping out from somewhere. It’s not necessarily something true or a factual account, but you’re nonetheless conveying the feeling. Do you ever try to solidify your memories and remember things more accurately, or try to figure out if you’re remembering something real?

I used to do a lot of stuff, not just about my childhood, but the things that everyone experiences as kids. You can look back today and see that kids are still going through the same things that we did, and you can think, “Oh I remember when such and such happened.” I got really interested in those situational things that everyone identifies with, but maybe the details are what make it a different experience for everyone. What really got me is that when I moved to NY, you start this whole separate life. I sort of forgot the things that were important. The small things, like just going outside and having a yard. So when I came home after 6 months to a year, you go back and everything seems slightly different. Even my own bedroom. Everything seems shorter, or not quite how you remember it. So that’s what sort of sparked it. So I started looking back and remembering everything from my childhood. My brother doesn’t remember anything from 13 back. I don’t know if it's because I’m constantly looking at photos and I think I remember it, but I don’t think any of that really matters. I’ll think of something and I’ll ask my mom about it, and shell say that it wasn’t how I remember it at all. But that doesn’t really matter. The right or wrong doesn’t matter. It's what was in my head and what it was to me.

Well yeah, that was your reality, so who's to say who's remembering right.

Yeah. It's like those stories you hear as a kid that just keep getting more and more epic until you’re an adult, and it becomes this heroic story in someone else’s reality when it wasn’t really anything. I’ve been working with that a lot lately; that sort of narrative that’s familiar but dream like at the same time.

How has your work been evolving?

A lot of my work is cohesive. At least, I think it is. As I go on I add different things and subtract other things. I go through phases where the same things appear over and over again until eventually it phases out. I used to do a lot of animal heads that would represent the situation in simplest terms, on account of where the particular animals stand in the hierarchy of life. Then I just dropped it all together. After that happens I just block it out all together. I can’t go back. Now I've been doing the child-like narratives with flat backgrounds. Just recently I've gotten into doing interiors. For whatever reason, I’ve gotten really into textiles and patterns. My mom collects a lot of quilts. So I'm going with that for now. And Jordan suggested I try dropping figures all together and just focus on interiors, maybe try to create that same narrative just using the environment. I rely on figures so much, so it would be a challenge to try that.

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Are you conscious of your head to the paper, or do you just sit down, start drawing, and see what happens?

I can usually visualize what I want the composition to be in my head pretty accurately. I do a lot of thinking, but I hardly ever draw it out completely. I have a lot of notes and I’ll do tiny little thumbnails so I can see the composition, but in terms of actual painting, I sit down and plow through it. Hardly anything will change from beginning to end in terms of what I planned on putting down, except maybe something like a color or pattern.

So you said you were really into textiles and patterns lately. Are you interested in branching out from illustration?

My brother and I have been working on a children’s book for a long time. I'd really like to do other things. I’ve painted and have been drawing for so long that I haven’t really thought, “Oh. I could make this an animation.” I never really thought about anything else. But there are so many things that I'm realizing are available. There isn’t anything specific right now, but I am becoming interested in expanding. I actually recently saw the show Ace Of Cakes. I don’t have cable. I was flying home. Have you seen it? [laughing]

No [laughing]. What is it!?

Yeah I had never seen it either, but apparently it’s this show where artists will come and make these amazingly decorated cakes. None of them went to culinary school or anything like that and I would love to do that. It made me want to quit illustration and just go into making cakes. I’d love to use what I do but in a totally different medium. So that’s what I'm gonna do in the next few years.

I’m totally into that. Good lord, that’s a good idea. [laughing]

So you have had quite a few shows. Most recently you had a show at Cinders.

Yeah, in May. It was a group show. Mostly I have gotten shows through Jordan, but recently I've started getting them on my own. I had a show in Philly and a show in the Philippines. But I haven’t done the best PR that I could do for myself. I’m really horrible at that. Since graduation three years ago, I've sent out three promo cards. You’re supposed to do big blasts like, three times a year. So I'm a little behind there [laughing]. I really need to get on that. But shows are definitely something I need to pursue more. Luckily though, things have sort of fallen in my lap and things snowball like that. One job leads to the next a lot of the time. Or a show will bring in work and work and other shows.

I read in an interview of yours that you’re really into collaborating. Aside from you’re your brother, because I want to talk about the company you have with him, who have you worked with?

It’s something I've always been interested in. I just really like the idea of being able to work with people whose work I really respect. I’ve done personal projects with friends, and on editorial I've had a chance to work with cool art directors, but there’s nothing really big that I've had a chance to do yet.

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Who’s someone you’d love to collaborate with?

I really would love to do something with my old roommate, Eva Fann. She’s one of my friends and I really, really respect her work. She’s very inspiring. She thinks in a completely different way. I’d love to work with a lot of people, but she’s the first person I think of.

The company with your brother, Half Empty, Half Full, how is that? How did that come about?

He’s been doing it ever since he graduated from college. He’s five years older than I am. He went to school for lighting design but ended up doing graphic design. He did my site, and I'm lucky ‘cause I never learned that. We’ve done a lot of stuff in Chicago. It’s been a lot of band or musician albums and websites. He’ll do the graphic design or web design and I’ll draw. Like I mentioned, we do children’s books. The projects we’ve done together have been small, but I've been really happy with them because we just work so well together. We sort of make up for each other’s loses. I have no idea how to do anything on the computer and he doesn’t really draw. We also share the same sort of mind so he can tell me what he wants and I can understand what he needs really well. He still lives in Chicago, so I’m hoping we can continue to do that. Especially if I ever move back to Chicago.

Are you planning on that?

I was for a while. I love living here, but I have those days where I just need to get the hell out of the city. You can’t get out that easily unless you have a car or money to fly somewhere. So for a long time I really wanted to move back there. My family lives there, I can go camping, and it’s cheaper there. I like that city a lot, but it keeps getting postponed. I feel like I keep saying that I’ll go in a year, and then a year goes by and I haven’t moved. I have to play it by ear.

Okay, most importantly, in another interview you mentioned a “House on the Rock” as something you used to go to when you were a kid and that it was a source of inspiration. It sounds amazing! What is it? Where is it? Can I buy it?

[laughing] Oh my god. It’s an amazing house. I’ve been going every year ever since I was little. My family never went on big vacations, but we’d go camping and see these roadside attractions. There’s this house in Wisconsin. Its near Wisconsin Dells which is a faded out amusement park-type place. Kind of like if Coney Island was in the Midwest. Just so over the top and dated. I guess it’s where people go on vacation. [laughing)] But it’s the weirdest place. They have this robot museum that hasn’t been updated since the 80s, water shows where people perform doing skiing or whatever. Its really, really crazy. They have an upside down building that’s supposed to be a fun house.

All of this is the “House on the Rock?”

No this is the Dells. The house though is literally a house on a rock that an architect built in the 30s. There are so many things on it. One is this infinity room thing. You can walk out onto this platform to a certain point, but it keeps going and going until it’s about a half a foot across. But basically he kept building this house and expanding it every year. They still add a room every year. He collected everything. It’s a maze of collections of everything. Anything from swords and armor, to miniature things. They have the world’s largest indoor carousel and riding it are these half naked women mannequins.

That’s terrifying.

It is! [laughing] They also have a doll carousel. And the whole place is kind of dark. I think that’s what intrigued me as a kid cause it was kind of frightening. I still go there though and am blown away. You can buy tokens and every 100 feet there’s an orchestra that plays by itself if you put in your token.

It kind of makes me want to throw up.

It’s insane there. It really is. The original guy died and is most likely buried somewhere in the house. But they’re still adding stuff every year. I could sit here all night and explain what’s in it. They have a giant indoor Moby Dick sculpture that’s bigger than this apartment. (I have a huge apartment) So as a kid you spend all day there with your mind completely blown.

Well no wonder you do what you do [laughing].

I know [laughing]. I think that’s why I keep going back. I really enjoy going anywhere in America though. My aunt lives in Indiana and she used to live in Kentucky, and like, who goes there? But I really, really enjoy just going to small towns and visiting. After living here for a while you forget about small town America. It’s the little things like yards, or a small farmers market. Everything can be such a hassle here. All the things I was trying to get away from as a teenager, I'm starting to appreciate. Living in the middle of nowhere seems amazing to me now, whereas when I was a kid I thought it sucked. I'd love to live on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

You were carrying a motorcycle helmet when you came in and you mentioned that you don’t have one, but were just dropped off by someone else. You said you’d probably never drive a motorcycle again. What happened?

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My dad grew up on a farm and was really into dirt biking. He just came from this wild family of teenagers without a lot of parental guidance. So with us he was always trying to get us to do fun things when we were kids. But maybe they were a little wild. In particular, he bought my brother, my sisters, and me this tiny Honda 50, which is a little motorcycle. And he just put his helmet on us, which was huge and bobbling all around, and was just like, "Go have fun!” So we had these fields behind our house. We were riding through that and we hit a bump and the whole bike flipped over. My leg got caught underneath it and the muffler burned the entire back of my leg. I still have scars from it. It wasn’t anything horrible but it really freaked me out.

Did your mother try to kill your father?

Oh yeah. She was the one that had to change my bandages everyday. And it was so bad that the only way they would come off was if you sat in the tub for an hour until they floated off with your dead skin. So that was enough for me to be hesitant about driving one again.

Website
www.youfail.com

Photos
Erin Welsh

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