Like his creative heroes Miranda July or Spike Jonze, Julian Glander doesn’t enjoy being tied down to one style or medium. He makes comics, animations, music, games, and more, all united by a love for bright pastels and absurd humor. Lemonade spoke to the artist about soft serve ice cream and his obsession with TikTok.
How do you make gross things cute, or even lovable?
Ha, I guess I just have a lot of empathy for blobs. I feel like it’s harder for me to make non-cute work because it’s like…I have to look at it while I’m working on it, why would I make it look unpleasant?
Tell me a bit about your #ConnectedByLemonade commission.
Well, I am a really big fan of goo, drips, globs, etc., so the brief was really a dream. I’ve long been entranced by soft serve machines, the way ice cream just effortlessly extrudes out of them. I’d love to put a soft serve machine like 100 feet in the air and see if it would be possible to make a super long unbroken tube of ice cream.
So, that was the beginning of that idea. And then of course the dog in the flea collar is an irresistible visual that I was actually surprised I hadn’t used already. I used Blender to make the animation — for anyone who might not be familiar it’s an open-source 3D modeling program which I use for almost all my work, and I really love it.
You use 3D rendering techniques to make comic strips. What’s interesting to you about this collision of “high-tech” and “old school”?
There’s something really satisfying about working in 3D, and having a spatial relationship to the work that’s a little bit more grounded in reality than drawing. It feels like a mix of sculpting, architecture, and playing a video game at the same time.
When I make comics I follow a process that I think is pretty different from anyone else right now — I build out little scenes in 3D and then move around in the scene, capturing different angles to fit the script of the story I’m working on. It’s actually a lot like shooting a sitcom on a soundstage.
Who are some of your creative heroes?
I am a really huge admirer of people who bounce around between disciplines and follow their instincts to embark on whatever projects they want. Miranda July is someone I really look to as a role model…Mark Mothersbaugh, Spike Jonze. My favorite cartoonist is Sophia Foster-Dimino, her work is so gorgeous and amazing and so thoughtfully detailed without being cluttered.
Do you have any interest in the so-called ‘fine art’ world, which is a scene you occasionally satirize in your comics?
Oh, yeah, sure! I don’t really have anything against the fine art world. Back before the world shut down I went to a lot of art openings and group shows and there is just a lot of inherent comedy in it. More than any other area of creative expression it feels like there are a million unspoken rules that everyone is supposed to know — what you can and can’t say about a piece of art, how to act in a museum, how to talk about fine art, and all this weird unaddressed money floating around. There’s so much easy satire there.. maybe too easy.
On a daily basis, what sort of things make you laugh?
I guess my main source of entertainment now is TikTok. An insane, chaotic app, but it makes me laugh or cringe (or both) every single time I open it.
Tell me about one past work or project that was a total, unmitigated failure…and how you salvaged it (or not).
I seem to lose a lot of work, either in hard drive crashes or misplaced notebooks or just not remembering where I saved something. A couple weeks ago I was poking around and found a Garageband file called like, sdjfhsjkhdfkjsfd, which was a song I had started working on in 2015. I’m going to finish it soon. Maybe that’s a salvage.
What advice would you offer to a young artist?
Make things for your friends. Make things with your friends. Make friends out of clay, you’ll never be lonely again.
Check out more of Julian Glander’s work here, and don’t forget to follow #ConnectedByLemonade!
