Interview with Raven Creature

by kSea flux & Raven

Since she could pick up a pencil, Raven Creature drew. She drew all over everything including her own skin, giving her teachers and parents headaches. While she guards her given name she is legally Raven Creature now, to the surprised stares of being called at doctors appointments as the other patients look on.

Miss Creature makes her home in humid New Orleans, despite mosquitoes and storms.

Let's start with the basics. Where did you grow up?

rc: Mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose in particular. Hated it. Since first arriving in this lovely city of New Orleans six years ago I have considered it my home.

Do you have a professional education?

rc: I do. Of course like many people I have degrees I do not use -- two in fact. When I first left high school my parents didn't have much money so I started taking general and art classes at a local junior college. I really enjoyed my art teacher there, a woman named Barbara Bouchard. Before I got there I thought I was hot shit. She set me right. She looked at my drawings, the ones I was so proud of that my high school teachers and parents cooed over, and told me they were alright but I had much to learn. I was partially crushed but what she taught me more than made up for anything. I never did get a degree in art like I wanted, though I did come close to it. I ended up getting two other totally unrelated degrees. One in computer science. Go figure.

Tell me what your favorite thing to draw is.

rc: People. Scenes and still life's and buildings never held my interest for very long. I started just drawing eyeballs, and would build in the rest of the face around them, eventually adding all the details of the anatomy. I can draw clothes perfectly fine but the beauty of the human skin, it's contours, it's subtle shading and imperfections I find real beauty in. The eyes in particular.

What is your favorite medium?

rc: Pencil. Just simple pencil on paper. I can get the most subtle and harsh complexities working together within the texture of graphite. I normally use 4B through 7B pencils, and never erase unless I make a very terrible mistake, which honestly doesn't happen very often. I do use a kneaded gummy eraser to blot excesses of graphite from the page however. Part of my technique is to rarely draw a line; it's more using a soft touch with the pencil to suggest shading of more or less contrast. If I draw a line it is likely as crosshatching.
I can use other means but the satisfaction I get when someone at first glance thinks that a drawing of mine is a photograph before getting up close to it is worth my efforts. And before you ask, I don't copy photographs -- you can get a photocopier or Photoshop to do that for you. I do make it very similar to the image I am using, whether it be from a photograph, real life or dreams, and I do add in my own, albeit subtle, changes worked into the finished piece.

What are some other media you work in?

rc: Clay, by itself and working it with wire and other substances; acrylics, colored pencils. I had a whole series I was doing for a few years involving altering dolls into (usually) horrific things. I also love pen and ink, making these odd creatures that I can draw for hours before realizing where the time has gone. I have one piece, about 18 by 24 inches, that took me about 20 hours to draw, pen and ink on bristol. I love it but that was exhausting. Took months to finish it.

What are your other artistic interests?

rc: I was painting designs on glassware right after (Hurricane) Katrina but stopped when I realized that it was chipping or wearing off, to my chagrin. I want to learn the art of glassmaking so I can incorporate my designs into glass, versus on glass. I also have always had a love of metal but have never had the chance to learn metalworking.

Which art movements and artists have influenced you?

rc: When I was in college it was the surrealists like Dali, and what I like to call fantastic realism. I study the works of as many artists as I can, everyone from Brom and Lori Earley to Frieda Kahlo and Edvard Munch.

Where do your ideas come from? Can you tell me anything of your creative process?

rc: There are two distinct ways I create. One is to see or imagine a beautiful angle of a body and want to capture it, to show that essence which gives the skin life. The other springs from my dreamworld. It feels so nebulous to me, and I feel that by transferring that vague feeling I get sometimes when I wake from a crazy dream I can name it and know it. You know that never really works though. As soon as you name something you make it mundane and knowable. I love the mystery of what cannot be named.
But the mystery still eludes me, which is why I love it.
Hmm, I'll put it this way: I'll have an idea of something I want to create. I'll start it, and then before I know it the media takes over my muscles and the idea becomes its own creature and births itself out of my own hands, using my eyes. I am vaguely aware of the process of creating when this happens. I'll wake up the next morning, as of course they always birth late at night, and my eyes will pop open and I'll be so excited because I'll clearly remember starting something but not finishing it or even going to sleep. It's never what I envisioned but is always a new creature.

What challenges have you found in your work?

rc: Keeping my cats off of my drawings! That and finding enough time away from the mundane life to create. I like to call it finding time versus having time. We all have the same amount of time but choose different ways of filling it. In the past I (unconsciously) chose to fill my time with complacent fillers. Now I purposefully and intentionally direct myself towards my goals.

Which are?

rc: *laughing* Being able to create for a living. To create for myself and get paid for doing so. To always be mindful. And in the midst of it all I try not to take myself too seriously.

What do you do when you are not drawing or working on your art?

rc: I am currently writing a book of fiction. It is a book that follows a woman through a labyrinth that starts off normally enough but becomes a journey of increased bizarreness. It's a book on the lines between memory and reality and dreams. Insanity. It started off with some similarities with Alice in Wonderland but the further into it I write the less it's anything like Carroll's Alice. Except that the name of the main character is Alice Lethe.
I also just started learning to sew and I read a good deal. And I love to cook.

And my final question: why the name Raven Creature?

rc: I knew you couldn't resist! I've always liked the name Raven, and always hated my given name. It just never fit me. Creature I came up with when I was drawing them, what I would always call "my creatures". I felt that the odd demonic black creatures I drew sprung from some deep part of me, in an underworld cavern inside me as all creative channels spring from a part of their creator. There was no other way to describe them, they were creatures. I never wanted to name them beyond that. I even had one tattooed on me, a large one on one lower leg. I am the creatures creator, and so I thought I would make it official and become a Creature myself.

Raven's website is ravencreature.com where she showcases all of her incredible work online.