Richard Camara

February 1st, 2008

We started receiving his newsletter and were fascinated by his work. Richard Camara (www.richardcamara.blogspot.com) is a true discovery for the inhabitants of these submarine location. He’s a prolific artist whose work is at the same time refreshing and mature. But Richard is also a clear example of a global citizen and he has succesfuly completed the probably quite tedious test of completing our monthly questionaire with a bunch of clever answers.

First, one thing we want to ask everybody for this interviews: When?, Where?, How? and Why? you started to consider yourself an artist or at least when did you first started to see that you wanted to draw, paint… for a living?

As far back as I can remember, drawing has always been a (big) part of my life. In fact the first drawing I recall doing was at a very early age directly on my parent’s living room coffee table with a wide range of unwashable colored crayons :) Not that I have chosen to draw. It´s something that came naturally. And it would be very strange not to do it, just as if you would pull out a fish out of the water and expect it to live… Every step I took towards where I am right now was always drawing related: I studied and worked as an architect for some time, developed different collaborations as an author both in comics and illustration, and I teach workshops as well. Let’s face it: for me, there’s no way out from drawing!

How is a day in your life?

Usually, very, very busy because I’m more of a multi-tasking person. My routine includes following-up email contacts, receiving and delivering assignments, sending new exhibition or publishing proposals, attending exhibitions, practicing judo, going to the movies, etc… and much drawing in a daily basis. I need a lot of discipline to conciliate my professional and personal life in terms of time and space, for 3 reasons:
First, I love this job and I can’t get enough of it. Second, my studio is home-based so I’m basically living in the “office”. Third, because as a free-lance, I’m always looking for new opportunities, so my working hours are never limited to a 9 am to 5 pm schedule.

You do work as an illustrator and I feel that fits very much your graphic style but how different is your commercial work to your personal purely artistic work? In which way is your approach different for commercial and personal work? Do you find it very different or are sides of a same creative activity?

I find it very difficult to draw a line between my commercial and personal work because I am very self-demanding. I am as critical and sharp as possible in both cases exploring possibilities to their fullest extent, as long as the client, art director or editor allows me to. Even when I get commissions that have little personal interest for me, I take it as a challenge: Not to do just what I like, but to like all that I do.

In your work there’s a predominance of characters. The obvious questions is what are your main influences coming from comic books and possibly classical cartoon animation but also it makes me think about how much of your childhood might reflect on your work. Can you tell us about those influences and the “child inside of you” when you create?

I was born in the early seventies from Portuguese parents but grew up in different countries always attending French schools. These circumstances determined my mixed-cultural references. I was as fond of the classical tales I could read on books (Charles Perrault, La Fontaine, Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimm brothers…etc.) as I was of all the modern cartoons and animation seen on TV and comic-books (Hanna-Barbera, Japanese animation, Walt Disney, Marvel Super-heroes and of course all the French-speaking Bande Dessinée, such as Astérix, Tintin, Spirou, Gaston Lagaffe, Lucky Luke …etc). All these were my main influences by the time I started drawing. Nowadays I tend to see characters everywhere I look. Might it be an anonymous person with superhero potential that I find every morning in the bus or my all time neighbour that might become an instantaneous artificial TV celebrity. When I create characters for comic books, daily newspapers, children´s books or merchandising, I try to design their personality making them stand for an ideal, a country, a policy, a group, a brand, a product, a memory, a fantasy, a culture, a dream or even a nightmare….

You mention French and Belgian BD… and also cartoons and comic book from the last decades of the last century. Each one in a different way but I can see other artists worldwide that share these influences. Do you feel connected by them (I guess that if I’m wrong maybe with other influences) to other artists of your generation and somehow part of a “scene”?

I´m aware that many artists of my generation share common interests and although I feel connected to them, I have never intended to draw in a specific retro style or be part of a scene. My work relates directly to my need to communicate, to relate to others.

You also do collage and you also use old illustrations combined in a peculiar Richard Camara way. So you do illustration, you do comic books, collage and I’m not sure if you also paint. Do you feel more of a drawer, a painter, an all-around artist… in other words, how’s your relationship to the different art disciplines nowadays when the line between them is often blurry?

I consider myself a visual artist that likes to work with the different art disciplines. For me, these are all concerned and available when I create.
Some people are more comfortable using the same style, technique, materials, while others are more interested in trying out different approaches, working in the crossroad of references, blurring the line separating established knowledges, looking for new meanings in your work. I am more like that. In my opinion, that’s when work gets increasingly interesting…

Precisely I would like you to let us know about the importance you put in the process of creating. Maybe it’s more complex than it appears or maybe not, maybe you focus more on the final result and use different processes as long as they take you there… Is it fast and wild and not rational at all, is it meticulous and slow, do you dismiss a lot of the stuff you do?… can you elaborate on this, please?

My creative process actually depends on the assignment. First I have to fully understand what the commission is about, and only then define the best way to get there. In other words, there is a time to think and a time to act. I might work directly on paper fast and intensively if what I pursue is a more spontaneous solution (this would be a 10% thinking and a 90% acting). In other occasions, if my intention is to obtain a more elaborate image, I do a lot of research and sketches before moving to the final drawing (this would be a 90% thinking and a 10% acting).

About your comic books, I’ve always felt like the way you need to use a sequential narrative and so on takes you to a whole different challenge and demands from you not only a graphical talent but also a storytelling one. I feel like that has to come necessarily from the need to tell something. What kind of stories do you need to get out and put into the form of a comic book? Do you usually work with writers that write the script?

It is just as simple as this: storytelling fascinates me. I am always willing to hear and tell a good story. And if you add my inclination to draw on top of that, there’s your comic! Before I start writing a script, the story have to challenge me as a reader, both in an intellectual and emotional level. And when I finally draw my own scripts, I like to explore the graphical side of story-telling, looking for different ways to read an image sequence, sometimes even blurring the line between illustration and comics. On the other hand, lately I have been working side by side with other scriptwriters and I find it very stimulating.

You also have been working, even more lately, with different galleries. How do you feel in that environment?

Very much at ease. So far they all went very well. Fortunately, illustration and comics are more and more considered an art form, unlike 10 years ago, when they were seen as minor disciplines. On the other hand, I was interested in art galleries because they gave me the opportunity to reach another public segment and expose a different kind of work that wouldn’t have found a place in a newspaper, advertising campaign or illustrated children’s book.

What have you been working recently? Any interesting project coming up?

My new year’s resolution is to draw on a daily basis, so I am keeping up different sketchbooks in which I try to draw what surrounds me, just for the pleasure of it. This might come up in one of the exhibitions I’ve booked for 2008.

Something you want to do that hasn’t been proposed to you yet?

Amongst many other things, I would love to experience being an in-house illustrator in a Japanese toy company and to be able to create a wide range of characters to be released in plastic or furry toys, t-shirts, books…etc.

Can you recommend some artists or initiatives, maybe not too well known, that you feel people should know about?

I would recommend an art portal called Anteism (www.anteism.com) that has being showcasing talented Canadian & International artists, through shows, books, limited edition art prints and collaborative group art projects focused on creating crossovers between artists around the world, such as the iMYGRATE project. In iMYGRATE, artists from all over the world were asked to create and send their character artworks to participate in a cross Canada migration, relying mostly in public participation. These characters were posted in public places across Canada, hoping that passers-by which found them, would help in their migration. The results are still to be known…

Entry Filed under: Artists