"I like clean and simple things."
Katie: Talk about what you do-
Lisa: I do Graphic Design, I started last year. I don't feel like I can call myself a graphic designer. I've been doing art since I was three. I like to make things look good, pretty, and nice. As far as wanting the public to hear my opinions and ideas on life, politics, and the meaning of art, anything that makes art interesting, I'm not so into meaning. Art is not meaningful, making things look nice, drawing, working with my hands, putting things together, design is a good field to go into. I was a problem solver at a young age, and I would like to give advice when I was a kid. I feel like design would be a good way to work with people and work with peoples' ideas, and collaborating with people. I also played softball in high school, so I have always been bouncing ideas off people, and if I tried to make a living solely as an artist I would miss that interaction.
K: What inspires you/ what are the inspirations in your life?
L: My biggest inspiration is Kiki Smith, she is an amazing printmaker, and is why I am interested in printmaking. Inspirations in my life- the human body, not in a figurative painting kind of way, but in biology and anatomy, like in plant anatomy. I'm obsessed with feet, bones in feet and hands because I can make things with my hands. I love my hands, they are my favorite part about me.
K: What makes you want to make art?
L: "I have to. I enjoy it and I think I'm good at it. And I feel really lucky because a lot of people go through their life not having something they think that they're good at and it's kind of depressing, and I always thought I was really lucky to be like alright, this is what I'm good at and what I really love to do and this where I'm gonna go." I also didn't go to art school at first. I went to Montclair State for a year and didn't know what my major was. I was upset and depressed. The applying to college experience was really traumatizing, and I didn't apply to art schools, just private liberal arts schools, and I didn't get into any. I was crushed, and I'm a horrible test taker. My SAT scores were awful. I just had one rejection after the next. I put so much into it. I even silkscreened my college essay on the back of t-shirts and sent it in with my portfolios. Then I realized I probably didn't get in because I didn't apply to art school. If I went to a liberal arts school I probably would have gone into writing. Then what the determining factor was to go into design was a senior internship I had. I went to high school in the city, and my school made the kids get an internship, called senior project, where you would take the trimester off to do an internship. I worked for Paper Magazine for the creative director Peter Buchanan Smith. I idolized him. He doesn't work at the magazine anymore, and is becoming a successful designer now. He's really cool, and I liked it a lot.
K: Why did you decide to come to Mason Gross?
L: I heard a lot of good things about Mason Gross. My best friend went here for journalism and said good things about it. I visited it and liked it. I also came from a really small high school. There were forty kids in my graduating class. It was like a little community and I knew all the same people and hated them at the end of high school. I never had that big school environment. Here it's like a school within a school. You get a community feeling but a bigger feeling around that so I could feel anonymous, which I really like.
*Lisa received a phone call during the interview from Career Services at Princeton University about a possible graphic design internship she applied for the night before.*
K: What was that?
L: That's really exciting. It's a paid internship where I would make promotional stuff for them. The deadline was five days ago but my teacher wrote to them apologizing for not giving me the email about the opportunity in time. I applied last night at one in the morning.
K: Any thesis ideas?
L: I'm in the early stages of an idea. I'm playing with the idea of identity and kind of being alone or anonymous in a big city.
*Showed me her sketchbook and a piece of handmade paper with hair embedded in it caught my eye.*
K: Is that hair?
L: Yeah but it didn't stick that well. I stole it from my friend's hair bucket.
K: A hair bucket?
L: (Laughs) Because she cuts hair, and because she's weird.
K: What other ideas do you have?
L: I was thinking about making clothes that reflect the background of where people are, blending into their environment but still being there. Outfits with texture, like a shirt with the texture of this wall. I really like the Invisible Man. He's a Chinese artist. I would do something more accessible like a shirt, or a projection, but I want to make the project not on a computer. Maybe elements on the computer, but build something, or print something. I'm still in the early stages.
*Lisa also showed me a project for design class. Images of her Neutrogena blotting papers with oil patterns documented over a twenty-four hour period varying in sizes, some enlarged and others slightly larger than the blotting paper itself.*
L: I like playing with things being other things. Looking at something and not knowing what it is exactly.
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