G, the artist responsible for the front page illustration, the full-page poster a page back, and the works on display here is an RCTC student majoring in graphic design. They plan to work in animation, ideally back in Washington. G works outside of class as one of professor Simon Huelsbeck’s studio assistants. They grew up in the Rochester art scene, participating and being featured in shows since elementary school. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. You can find them on Instagram: dr.sillyseal. Find art and message for business/comission inquiries. Studio.zabloink/card.coG takes commissions – graphic design to D&D character reference illustrations.
@dr.sillyseal
Where do you come from?
G: I’ve lived in Rochester, Minnesota for 10 years, but I was actually raised in Tacoma, Washington.
My dad moved for work when I was pretty young with the whole housing crisis and whatnot. And we found here to be a secure, nice place. I’ve been here ever since. I attended John Marshall through my freshman year throughout quarantine. And then when quarantine ended, I transferred to Century except for my senior year, I started doing PSEO full time. I graduated 2023.
When did you start involving yourself with art?
G: When I was really little. But in terms of the actual art community in Rochester, it was sometime around 2013. I was still really little. I would attend art shows for the Creative Salon, I would help with tear down and putting things up. I was surrounded by tons of visual artists and musicians and everything.
Where are you headed with your art and ideas?
G: I work in a lot of different mediums. But if I had to describe the one that aligns the closest to what I truly want to do with our in my career, it would happen to be digital art, specifically animation. I’ve been making YouTube videos and short films and animation since I was, like, 13. I really find that bringing a concept, or character, or just an idea to life through a bunch of moving pictures to be incredibly powerful. It almost feels like weird magic when I do it. But that’s been the main thing that has really motivated me to improve my art. However, I also do a lot of traditional pieces. with ink, specifically India ink, and I do brush work with that. I’ve also been experimenting with oil paints, and things of that variety.
I am a huge dork about cartoons and movies. And in part, my autism really helps me drive ideas and create them. One of my main overarching interests that I’ve had have been in kind of like, artsy, experimental niche animations, which inspire a lot of ideas for me. Bella Donna of Sadness, a Japanese film made in the 70s has inspired a lot of my watercolor and ink pieces.
A lot of my character ideas come from, this is actually gonna sound a little creepy, but from people I know and people that I observe. I like doing a lot of people watching. And I consider myself to be really perceptive of how people act. I combine a bunch of traits I take from people. And that’s what helps me create characters.
As of late, I’ve been exploring absurdist or surreal ideas with my oil paintings. I recently made a piece called Dead on Arrival, which is a deer floating on water/ice, you decide. For the inspiration… I really like [PlayStation2] graphics and old graphics of that era of 3-D modeling where things were kind of uncanny. They weren’t quite, quite right. I thought I could utilize that style to create an unnerving, weird-feeling piece.
Tell me about your journey with the RCTC art department.
G: As for my personal path with RCTC arts; I’ve been trying to utilize them as much as humanly possible and I think that has really improved my work. Based off of the amount of practice and the amount of access I have to materials that I wouldn’t really have otherwise, I would have never really thought to experiment with oil painting if it wasn’t readily available, I wouldn’t have thought to experiment with screen printing if I didn’t have those materials. I think it’s really cool the amount of materials offered to students in those classes.
There’s one incredibly underutilized, incredibly important studio on the school that it seems like nobody ever uses. It’s the Graphic Design Lab. Those are incredibly powerful tablets and it’s loaded with the Adobe Creative Cloud, and that can be used for so many cool things. If you’re a student interested in pursuing graphic design or digital art or something like that, or even photography, since it’s also loaded with Lightroom, you should really check out the Graphic Design Lab. There’s also a Glowforge and a 3d printer.
How do you feel about AI?
G: I don’t think it should be used at all, period. for art. Mostly because a lot of AI models are based off of collecting art pieces from people who didn’t consent to that. That’s incredibly scary and mildly dystopian. I think the nature of AI, since it’s free, it’s going to eliminate a lot of jobs for graphic designers and artists.
While it can be a helpful tool for generating ideas, I really don’t think the concept of AI is worth it for a lot of people. I think it sucks a lot of the the humanity out of art. I think one of the most important components of art is that there’s a person behind it. That art is an expression of a human, or an animal, or whatever. You can see that in an art piece, you can see it was crafted by somebody.
Advice for artists breaking into the professional world?
I’ve noticed that a lot of artists, including myself when I was younger, will undersell themselves.They think their art isn’t really worth it. What’s helped me is to realize: the people who really like your art and are willing to pay you for it are going to be willing to pay what you’re charging. They’re willing to put in that amount of money because they believe your work is worth it.