CARMINE MAGAZINE

Carmine Magazine: How would you define your style?
Leanna Wright: It’s rather cartoonish and surreal with a large heaping of retro influences and a love for detailed linework.

CM: What things inspire and influence you and your artwork?
LW: I don’t know how else to put it besides human culture and subculture. Music, fashion and cult/classic movies definitely play a part, but I also think my drawings say a lot about who I am whether it’s obvious or not. An instructor of mine once told me that when he looked at my work all he could see were self portraits even if the actual images were of inanimate objects, famous people, plants, etc. I think he was right in a way, because I also tend to dress and surround myself with the same kind of colors, shapes, and objects that I draw.

CM: Do you listen to music when you create? Describe your perfect creative work environment.
LW: Oh definitely. When I put on music I’ll probably either end up dancing in front of my mirror or sitting in bed drawing. Rock music and its many bastard offspring get me out of bed in the morning! But really I think my perfect environment has less to do with what’s going on around me and more to do with what’s going on inside my head. A lot of my favorite drawings came about in the dead of night. Sometimes I get this feeling like I know I should be sleeping, but I can’t until I’ve created something I’m satisfied with, and I’ll just sit there for hours adding more and more. When I eventually go to sleep I’ll leave the drawing laying next to my bed so I can greet it in the morning with a fresh pair of eyes. If I can’t finish a drawing in a matter of a few hours I usually don’t come back to it because I’ll have lost that particular train of thought.

CM: What mediums do you work in the most? Why do you use them?
LW: Mostly pen and ink because I feel like I have more control over ink than any other medium. I’ll frequently use paint to color big, solid areas. I’ve experimented with a lot of different things, but I always come back to drawing with pens.

CM: Name a few of your favorite artists.
LW: Ok, I’ll do it in run-on sentence form too. I’ve loved Edward Gorey since I was a kid, pop artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg never fail to blow me away, Diane Arbus’ photographs show real people looking very surreal and I never get tired of looking at them, Raymond Pettibon - especially his flyers and album covers from the 80s - really capture the intensity and violence that you hear in hardcore music, and I wish I could draw beautiful girls like Audrey Kawasaki and Miss Van. I could definitely go on, but I’ll leave it at that.

CM: If there was one style of art that you could take up what would it be?
LW: I’ve always been interested in graffiti and other types of guerilla street art but I just don’t think I have the ovaries to do it. I’ve put up stickers to beautify my neighborhood, but that’s about as far as my courage will take me.

Find Leanna’s work at these places on the web:
Official Site
Skank_all_Day on Livejournal
DeviantART

Some artwork from Leanna Wright: