Artists Needed: An Interview with NERDSAGES on Art, Columbus and Their New Project
Kaylee Davis and Darian Artis Shephard may not be household names, but you’ve definitely seen their work. Both are two of the designers working for popular t-shirt meme company, LookHuman, where they’ve helped create some incredibly enduring designs in their four years. You might even be wearing one right now.
They’ve set their sights much higher in the last few months though, creating NERDSAGES – a place for lovers of art, design and all things nerd. They hope to build a community of like minded artists who can collaborate on a variety of artistic ventures.
Their first is a book project entitled: Plants are Friends and I had the opportunity to ask some questions about their expectations and their philosophy.
What was the inspiration to do a book like this and is there anything about Columbus that helps inspire these kinds of projects?
Kaylee: I think a lot of artist find the networking side of the creative community to be anxiety inducing. I definitely do. Artist communicate visually, often because they struggle to express themselves verbally. Having your work featured in anthology alongside an array of other artist helps to bridge that gap from “peer” to “collaborator.” Columbus inspires me because there is such a wealth of talent. This has been a really rough year for a lot of the artist that I know and I wanted to create a project that that we could all look forward to collaborating on.
Darian: I second Kaylee, The idea really came from being in a space where we understood how it felt to be undervalued as artists and wanted to take a crack at trying to, I don’t know, do something that we could enjoy with our friends and be able to help them in turn get in contact with other artists as well. And being a CCAD alum you get to witness just how much talent comes to Columbus and actually stays here. It’s a great resource and I hope we can get the creative community as pumped for this project as we are.
What are your favorite plants, and why do you think so many artists love interpreting them?
Kaylee: My favorite plants are succulents. You can break their leaves off and propagate them into a new plants. My house is lousy with propagated baby plants. I think artists have a penchant for using plants as subjects because they’re right in the middle of being still life and portraiture. Plants are life forms so they’re perfect and flawed at the same time. There’s a lot an artist can learn about flow, balance, pattern and composition from studies of plant life.
Darian: Definitely the rainbow eucalyptus. I’ve always wanted to see them in person and this past year my family and I got to see them in Hawaii. I just think it’s awesome just how beautiful and weird nature can be.
What kind of artists are you looking for and where do you see this project in a month?
Kaylee: We’re looking for artist who love to tell stories. A lot of the artist who’ve submitted work so far are illustrators and storyboard artists, and more of that is always welcome. We’re accepting work from all kinds of visual artists, everything from fine art to graphic design. There’s actually a graphic designer working on an infographic for the book about about famous video game plants, which is awesome.
Darian: Yeah.
Kaylee: As long as we’ve successfully collected at least 50 high quality submissions for the project we’ll move on to crowdfunding next month. Ideally we’ll have twice that number, but 50 is our minimum. We have a lot of awesome promotional pieces we’ll be moving as well. Inked and Screened will be printing some beautiful silk screened art posters designed by Lisa Sterle, and I’m working on a plant care zine titled “Don’t Kill Your Friends.” We’ve done a lot of research and have all the pieces on our end in place so as soon as we get the art and the funds, we are set to get printing!
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