Beauty of Nature in Everything Around Us
A Conversation with the Artist Antonio Lewandowski
Antonio Lewandowski is an artist and musician based in Germany. He sat down with members of our editorial board Shayan and Clara for an interview on his art and outlook towards life. We discuss graffiti, his journey in the arts, the connections between music and visual arts, and what inspires him. You can follow him on Instagram (@illlewizzle) or Artstation (@illlewizzle).
Clara: Tell us about yourself. What got you into art?
Lewandowski: In a way, I have always been into art. As a kid, I was drawing all the time. My dad got me into it. We developed a comic character together. Then I started doing it on my own, developing more and more characters and drawing comics. They were very simple, but I liked the idea of storytelling, especially through simple pictures. I really love artwork that’s detailed and realistic and insanely gorgeous. But I found that I can’t do it. It’s not my style. So I got into the simple kind of storytelling, and illustration seemed to me to be exactly that. In a minimal way, you are telling something, showing people something, and are thereby making it obvious. So in a way, I got into art through my dad and then obviously developed my own interest in it. With Music as well. And I think nowadays, music and art are so interlinked, so connected. You can’t have one without the other. So I just kept that going.
C: I am curious about your first character. What was it?
L: It was a kind of cockroach with human features. It walked on two legs and had arms, but it had the face and mindset of a cockroach. We used it to reflect on human behaviour. It was fun.
C: Was it behaving like a human?
L: Yes.
C: Human cockroach. It sounds exciting!
L: Yeah. The other way of telling the Kafka story.
Shayan: Given where you are and the kind of work that you currently do, were you inspired by particular people along the way? Who are some of the artists that you think influenced you the most?
L: Graffiti had a great influence on me. For some time I tried it myself, but I never really got much into it. But the format, the kind of bombing and the very simple and big and placative form of art, that kind of stuck with me.
S: Yeah, I think there is something to be said about artwork that is not in a private collection or hidden in a museum where you have to pay an entrance fee to go and see and such. It is just out there in public and you just pass by and appreciate and enjoy it, and then it changes over time. I think there is quite a bit of spirit and beauty to that. It’s not such an elite thing then, right?
L: Yeah, exactly. And it’s \ closer to the people in terms of the topics and language.
C: When you do your artwork, do you think about who will see it? Do you have a certain group of people in mind that you would like to reach with your art?
L: To be honest, I don’t think about it that much. I think as soon as you start thinking about the people who are supposed to get it you start making it for the people. And I think that can mess up the process. Because I feel like I need to do it because it’s within me. I need to get it out, I need to tell it my way. But as soon as I think about making it for certain people I start making changes to make it more appealing to them. So I try not to think about it that much.
But I think, obviously, I’d like to reach people that are intelligent (haha) and able to read it, to read what I’m trying to hint at, and hopefully people that can make a change. Tomorrow… or today. So mostly, I guess, people my age, maybe younger, so they can still do something about it. Or find themselves in it, obviously.
S: It’s kind of cool to think about it that way, because, you know ultimately, I remember reading this book on writing and the writer was a newspaper reporter, William Zinsser was his name, and he used to teach a lot of writing classes. He talked about how people wanted to — even before they started writing something — they were thinking about where they wanted to publish it and how much that changes the outcome. You just kind of do the work that you do and look at the result in the end. And kind of take it from there, instead of the other way around. I think that is something very remarkable because I think the art scene got very marketized, right? That art is just produced for a market and goes so much with what the market calls for in a way, right?
L: Absolutely.
S: I wonder, in this process, what are some of the variables, or forces, or things around you, that you feel have supported you on your journey? Or kind of kept you interested or going? Was it more from the inside or from the outside? Or a mixture of both?
L: I’d say a mixture of both, but mostly from the inside. I mean I got triggers from the outside but they just triggered something that was inside and I went deep into that. I started reflecting a lot. Yeah, there were some people, not many, but a handful of people that were really important influences.
C: What supported you in this process of becoming an artist, maybe even something that you could recommend to other people?
L: Self-reflection was a big thing for me. By reflecting on what I’m feeling or doing or even thinking about things around me and trying to find out what triggered these thoughts and feelings really opened my eyes to the world around me, people-wise. I mean, I see people and I can relate to their actions a lot more and see where they are in their head or why they do what they do and feel the way they do. So that was a big thing for me.
And also, reading a lot. I read all the time. And I try to find the right balance between books of fiction and non-fiction. But it’s always books that can kind of broaden my experience of the world or being human. Books that surprise me or tell me new things about people or the world. New views of the world that I didn’t expect or that I even might hate or dislike, and I read it to just get a different point of view on it. So reading would be my recommendation, actually.
And researching what you are into. Especially, I think, music. When you listen to a lot of those lyrics and old songs, I personally started researching a lot about these musical influences that I favored and therefore found out a lot about the art scene at the time that the song was made and the world around it.
C: This connection between music and art, you mentioned it also in the beginning. Can you describe how this connection feels inside yourself? How does it work? Because you do both right? You make music and you make art. How does it influence each other? Does it strengthen each other? How does it play into each other?
L: It’s hard to tell. For me, it was always both. I always feel like when I listen to music, it triggers pictures in my head. I just need instrumentals and I get pictures in my head. And those play in kind of movies in my head. And that triggers ideas. Thereby I come up with these pictures that I then try to draw as well as I can. The other way around, too. If I see a picture and it triggers a certain feeling that translates into melody and music, or just ideas for lyrics. So for me, it has always been indistinguishable. It belongs together. And, I think nowadays with Youtube and all these platforms, we always have pictures linked with music through videos and all that. Back in the day, obviously, it was cover artwork for vinyl records, album artwork and all that, which I really loved. Which might also have been an influence on me, now that I think about it.
C: Are there certain political and societal topics that you try to bring into the world through your artwork? Are there some opinions you want to highlight? Is there something you want to influence people in?
L: I try not to make it too much an opinion, but to make people think — like provocation and thereby make people think about what they see and make a connection. I just want people to think about certain things, like politicians and their corruption. I think a lot of things are going on that people are too unaware of. And what always keeps me going are these double standards. People always point towards a picture of an enemy or opponent that they often don’t even think about — it’s there, so it is the enemy. And I feel like a lot of people around me don’t think about it too much, that they do to a certain extent themselves of what they hate about other people. So it’s this double standard that really interests me. And I try to kind of highlight that. And I think politics is kind of an easy target for that.
S: So it seems like portraying the broader paradoxes, or maybe not necessarily even portraying them, but creating a dynamic by which people can imagine portraying themselves, you don’t just want to present it, you want it to be discovered in some ways. That’s pretty cool.
Looking at it, starting from your childhood, the illustration, the cockroach man to the kind of work that you do now, there has been a transition that has obviously been quite subtle over the years. Where do you see yourself being a few years from now? Are there any particular callings in your artwork or music work that you are going to explore, or is it hard to tell?
L: It’s hard to tell [laughing]. I try to live kind of for the day, and not worry too much about what might be there. But there obviously are things I’d like to explore more, other techniques. I’d like to return to graffiti and street art. I was in London last year and had a guided tour through Shoreditch, which has a lot of street art, and it transported me back into that thought process.
C: So I guess you see it more like an organic flow into whatever comes, but with certain things that you’d like to experiment with and that you’d like to get more into. But you’re leaving it pretty open.
L: I like leaving it open to influences all the time.
C: Do you have any collaboration or exchange with other artists?
L: Not that much anymore. Through studying, obviously, I had [exchange with] other artists, but not anymore, no. I’d like to. Most of the artists I used to hang out with moved away, and we lost contact.
I always loved creating with others. That’s what I loved about music when I started it. It was just me and two people, two friends of mine, and we just sat together and wrote shitty lyrics and made our own shitty beats and it was horrible if I look at it now but it was the greatest time because it was just sitting together and writing together and having fun with it, this atmosphere, this state of mind. So I love working with other people on projects.
C: That’s interesting that you say that. I think that extends to a lot of creative work we do, too.
L: Sometimes I look back at songs and think, oh my god, what was I thinking?!
C: [Laughing] That means you are in process, right? Why don’t we take a closer look at one of your artworks? How about Strange Fruit? What is the idea behind it?
L: The song “Strange Fruit” by Nina Simone inspired me. When I heard it, I thought it was pretty touching. I listened to the original song version by Billie Holiday, but I like the version by Nina Simone better. Anyway, it was originally a poem. It is about lynching back in the Jim Crow era in America — ell, the USA, not America — especially in the Southern states. Just listening to these lines — “strange fruits hanging from a poplar tree” — put this image into my head. It also says, “pastoral scene of the gallant South,” and that’s how the South still likes to look at itself. So I wanted to show it through the noose hanging there; people hanging from it. And I put the blood around it to show the objective truth that there has been blood and racism and just brutality all over. But through [Southerners’] sense of justice, and that being presented by the noose, they see their gallant Southern picture with the beautiful tree on the hill and the blue sky.
C: Interesting. I hadn’t seen the text and I just interpreted it so differently. I thought it was about the environment and how the environment gets “hung” in a way.
S: My interpretation was somewhat similar to that of Clara, but it kind of goes to show what you described earlier about how you want people to do some thinking of their own. But you know, another thing is, if I would have read this caption, it would have been different, because I think it wasn’t in the email. You know, that also goes to show that we could interpret artwork either way.
L: That’s what I also think about art — that it’s best sometimes not to be explained. I read about how nowadays, in exhibitions, they have the picture and next to the picture they always have a text with the name and an explanation of what they are trying to achieve with this image, and I read in a magazine (don’t remember which one), they said that these labels on the side get bigger and bigger and probably someday the image is going to be small and next to it is going to be a two-meter explanation of what it is supposed to say.
C: What is the reason for this, do you think?
L: I feel like people want an explanation of what is meant so they know what they are looking at. Partly because it’s easier and it’s also part of the modern way of just consuming art.
That is why I prefer not to explain too much, usually. I like to make people think on their own. And I like it if it’s something that I didn’t think of but it still makes sense in the picture. As you said, that environmental topic. And that is what really interests me; that’s cool, I think.
C: Is your visual work primarily digital arts?
L: Before I started studying, I used to do everything by hand, scribbling everywhere. My teachers hated it. But through studying, they showed us these tablets and digital drawing, and I grew to love it. And now I only use that. That is why I said I would like to return to graffiti and [spray paint], because I love that medium and I would like to expand and maybe draw digitally first, make the picture, and then try to transform it into graffiti.
C: Shall we talk about one more picture? I am curious about the whale.
L: Yeah, it is actually the one I thought about the least. I was just working at my day job at the assembly line and I was bored to hell and I thought of a friend, actually, and kind of had new music ideas in my mind, and this picture just showed up in my head and I thought, “damn, that’s a weird idea, I’d like to just spit it out.” So I sat down at home and did it. It is actually one where there is not so much to explain. For me, when I finished it and I looked at it, I thought “it is kind of the overall beauty of nature in everything around us.” There is beauty in the big things and the little things, thereby they kind of are the same.
