Self Portrait (T-Rex)

Sophy Tuttle

Interview by L. Valena

First, can you tell me what you responded to?

Originally when I saw the image, I remember thinking that it seemed to be like a portrait, but kind of hidden or obscured behind a few layers. It's really hard to see what the figure is. It kind of leaves room for interpretation. It almost kind of looks like a T-Rex. It probably isn't, but that was my first thought. So actually I did include that. If you look really closely, there's an outline of a T-Rex.

Oh, I see it! That's awesome. I never would have seen it if you hadn't pointed it out. I love it. Okay, so what happened next?

So I was thinking about: what does it mean to respond to an image with another image? I'm trained as an illustrator, so I've responded to a lot of writing and articles and stuff with art, but never an image to an image.

How did it feel?

It was fun. It was interesting. It was a little challenging at first. I saw the image and then I waited a few days and had to really think about what I was going to do. Like it wasn't just kind of a visceral reaction to it. What I decided to do was kind of take some of the elements of the portraiture, and kind of what looks like it could be automatic drawing with the light. It reminded me of blind contour drawing. I decided to kind of use inverted colors- warmer colors, and then just start with some blind contour drawings. I started with the T-Rex, and then I did a couple of different birds because I thought it kind of looked like a bird. And then I did my own portrait, and sort of filled things in from there. As I was responding, I started responding to my own automatic drawings.

I like the concept of automatic drawings. I think that's pretty cool. We definitely hear about automatic writing, but I don't really think of automatic drawings. It sounds like you were almost layering your various experiences of the subject matter, or you were layering the different takes that you had of it over and over again.

Yeah. I think for an artist, I'm a very literal thinker. I was kind of just responding to the formal elements that I was seeing, but not necessarily thinking about like emotion or subjective things.

You mean the figurative elements that were suggested in the piece?

Yeah, and the cool colors in it. So I responded with warmer colors. The quality of the lines and the kind of ambiguity is the subject. The yellow.

Cool. It's so interesting. Most people aren't used to responding to work with new work. It's just not something that we do. To make sense of it, a lot of people will like write about what they would they see or experience and then they'll respond to what they wrote. I think it's really cool that you did not take that step. Instead of doing that writing exercise, it was purely a drawing exercise and then you went off of that in a way, and it started responding to the drawing that you had made.

Yeah. This was actually really fun because it's a really different way of working for me. I'm generally very research-based. I get a lot of references, then I follow the references very closely. Things are anatomically accurate and color-accurate and everything. So this was actually really fun to just kind of let go of all of that. Maybe there's a T-Rex in there, but I can't tell. There’s nothing definite in here anyway, so why not start there?

Is blind contour drawing something that you otherwise do in your life?

It's something I did a lot in college, but I haven't really kept up with like the figure drawing, and the contour drawing and that kind of stuff since I've been out in the real world.

I think blind contour drawings are so cool. A while ago in grad school, I actually got a bunch of people (who were not in school for art- it was an academic program), but we got like a whole classroom of people to do blind contour drawings. It was the coolest thing because you just didn't see any of those hesitating lines. You know how most people who aren't used to drawing will kind of make those really hesitating, shy lines? It was so cool to like see a wall of drawings made by people who did not identify as artists, with these crazy lines that had so much commitment to them.

It can be really like expressive and gestural in a way that... I forget that I can make lines like that sometimes just because all of my work is so formal. It's nice to just be able to go back and realize that we all do have that in us. We're just often too afraid, or if we've been told we can't or whatever.

Too afraid. I like that. That's such an important part of this project for me- getting out of our comfort zones and testing the boundaries of what we're comfortable with. Getting comfortable with new weird things. Tell me more about the rest of the work that you do.

I'm actually in grad school myself right now. I'm getting a master's in interdisciplinary art. It's a program that's kind of focused on social and environmental justice and supporting regenerative culture and public art. It's really fun. It's through the University of Hartford, and we're actually the second year, so it's a really new program.

What are your interests within that?

I'm more focused on the environmental justice side, and I do focus mostly on public art experiences through murals. I do a lot of murals based on kind of environmental themes and endangered species. I'm working on my thesis right now, which is going to be like a monument or a mausoleum wall to all of the species that we lost in 2018. There's no definitive list for this, but the the prediction is that every day we lose up to 200 species.

What?

So like every single day. Yeah. So I'm just doing kind of an imagined memorial to those species. I'm making 200 different plaques with little sculptures and stuff.

It's interesting to think about art and its role in environmental activism. I used to be in the coffee business and years ago I was visiting a farm in Guatemala. It was like my first and only trip to origin. But it was so cool because the guy who owned the farm was a huge, bleeding heart fan of this artist, this wild Cubist artist who had studied under Wifredo Lam. And the farm owner commissioned the artist to come out and make a mural on his farm. It was like the sexiest thing ever. We're high up in the mountains in Guatemala in Huehuetenango, and here's this crazy, Cubist mural. It just made me think about how cool it would be there if there is more art on farms.

Yeah. It's fun to encounter art in an unexpected place like that. The synergy between the landscape and the art. I painted a shipping container on my friend's farm last year. Spent a week just painting this entire container, and it was in Florida, in the winter. So I was taking my sweet time. It was really nice. Chickens everywhere all the time, and animals coming up to see what I was doing.

So different from a studio.

Yeah. That's why I love doing murals. Like the chance on the random encounters. People yelling things at you- good or bad.

What else do you have to say about this piece or about this process?

I don't know. It's probably not something that's going to go up on my portfolio site for me to show everyone all the time, but the more I look at it I realize that I kind of like it. I wonder if there's a way to incorporate this kind of work into what I'm doing. I don't know. It's nice just to be kind of shaken out of your prescribed way of working. I've been in this really intense two year grad program and I'm on my thesis now, and I have to do things on a timeline. So it's nice just to be reminded that there are different ways of working.

You've got this wild art spirit deep inside you that's there whether you're actively engaging with it all the time or not.

Call Number: M20VA | M24VA.tuSe

Sophy Tuttle is a visual artist born in Colchester, England and currently residing in Medford, Massachusetts. She received her BFA in Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and is currently working on an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Hartford Art School. Influenced by artists such as Walton Ford, Mark Dion, and Alexis Rockman, Sophy uses visual storytelling to reimagine the future, resituate our position in the web of life, and create new narratives that explore regenerative, resilient culture-building among all forms of life.