Interviewer: Anthony Andujar Jr
Interviewee: Zina Saunders
Hello and welcome to the Artist Ant Interviews People Fall Series! Welcome to another edition to my latest talks with local and global creatives that are alive, hustling and thriving in their respective crafts! Today I have a very special guest, one who made a very huge impact on me since high school. The year was late 2009, I was a freshman in high school and at that time I attended Art and Design High School. I and 6 other friends of mine were in different schools, and we all weren’t feeling the schools that we were in, so we eventually returned back to our old school and decided to finish high school there. Thanks to Pattie Anderegg, she decided to keep me occupied with my art, and encouraged my pursuits, by bringing in an after school instructor / mentor specifically for me (and eventually my sister).
At this point in time, I was struggling to decide on the art that I wanted to pursue in regards to comic book storytelling or music. This individual taught me the importance of drawing whatever I felt, and helped me to learn that artists aren’t exclusively just secluded to one medium, that they can dabble between various mediums and still love each medium that they craft from. I called her Professor Z, but to the rest of the art community and the world, she goes by a different name. Ladies and gents of the digital realm, please welcome the legendary Zina Saunders!
Q0. Who are your inspirations?
ZS: My first inspiration was my father, illustrator Norman Saunders. As a very young child I used to work on a little table in his studio drawing pictures of horses and fashion models. I also used to paint on his paintings when he was away from his desk: I would paint lavish eyelashes on his damsels in distress. Years later I asked him if he knew I did that. “Of course I knew! And I used to paint them right out as soon as I saw them."
Around my father's studio were Saturday Evening Post cover paintings by J C Leyendecker, which I used to admire and later as I was doing illustration for a living I would copy some of his techniques, as best I could. I also admired the work of NC Wyeth and the marvelous pen and ink drawings of Heinrich Kley.
Now that I do fine art type paintings, I'm inspired by the work of Philip Guston, de Kooning, Picasso and Joan Mitchell.
Q1. How did you get into art?
ZS: I've known since I was about three years old that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. When I was young I wanted to be a fine artist doing the kinds of paintings I'd see in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum. But I also wanted to be an illustrator like my father and I felt I had the whole world open to me to try whatever I could. I spent my 20s partying and not doing much art at all but by the time I got into my mid 30s I had begun to calm down and change my focus to trying to do art for a living.
My first jobs were doing drawings of shoes for the catalogs that shoe manufacturer salesman brought around to shoe stores. After doing that for a while, I began working on developing a portfolio for more ambitious illustration jobs, at first doing drawings in colored pencils. I found out that those were not very interesting to magazine art directors, so I switched medium and did an entire portfolio painting splashy exciting paperback cover type illustrations in gouache. I brought the portfolio around and eventually started getting work painting the cover illustrations for video movies. I've done many video cover illustrations for movies like Godzilla and Robin Hood and Peter Pan and a million other Grade D movies sold in places like Walmart back in 1992.
Q2. When did you decide to pursue art seriously as a career?
ZS: When I came out of the fog of my 20s.
Q2.1. What are some of the adversities that you experienced during the beginning of your art career?
ZS: The biggest adversity I faced was my own insecurity and feelings of hopelessness when I was rejected (which was often, at first). Every time I would go to pick up my portfolio from a company that was not interested in hiring me I would go back home with my shoulders hunched and my feet dragging and lick my wounds for a couple of days before going out yet again to drop off my portfolio at a new publication. I sometimes lost hope that I would ever be able to make a living at this crazy gig, but then my boyfriend Barry, who is now my husband, would give me some strong words of reassurance and I would feel hope again.
Q2.2. How did you discover your artistic voice and style?
ZS: I found the surest way to develop a style is to just draw what is the most fun for you to draw. The more fun I've had doing any painting that I've done over the course of my life, the better that painting has been. When I find myself really slogging through an assignment is when the finished product can look pretty tortured and lose a lot of of its life and vim and vigor. So I think the main thing to do is to just do whatever is the most fun and you'll be 90% of the way there.
Q2.3. What was your first big career move as an artist? How did that shape your creativity and work?
ZS: I've worked in so many different industries in the art business between doing the video covers I mentioned earlier to illustrations for the New York Times Sunday book review to Magic the Gathering cards or Dora the Explorer books or SpongeBob SquarePants games or Broadway theatre posters or portraits of politicians or animated cartoons, that I don't think I can really focus in on one particular big career move. I've just tried my hand at various different venues and had a lot of fun doing it.
Q2.4. What inspired your book, Overlooked New York? What was the development process like for the book? How long did that project take to make?
ZS: Overlooked New York began as a website. The concept of Overlooked New York began when I was walking through the East Village one day and I saw an older Puerto Rican man riding a tricked out bicycle with fox tails and flags and a radio blaring. I'd been seeing guys like this all my life, having grown up on the Upper West Side, where they used to hang out on Amsterdam Avenue, and I'd always wondered what they were all about. So when I saw this guy in the East Village I ran out into the middle of the street and I asked him if I could take some photographs of him with my little camera that I carried with me and he said sure. I told him I was going to paint his portrait asked him where I could bring a print of the finished painting to give him. He worked in a little bike shop nearby so after painting the picture I did a printout of it, about 13" x 19" on watercolor paper, and brought it to him at his job, where I also interviewed him.
That began my odyssey of painting Overlooked New Yorkers, a collection of over 100 portraits and interviews with ardent New Yorkers about their fantastic obsessions. Take a look at the website, http://www.overlookednewyork.com/ and you'll see all the groups of people that I've painted and interviewed: guys who raise pigeons on their rooftops, bike messengers, subway musicians, people who fish in the parks around New York, people who live on houseboats, who scuba dive in the rivers around town, and who swim in those rivers, street performers, amateur astronomers ... the list goes on and on. Painting these people and interviewing them has made me feel so much more connected to the world around me, to learn that these extraordinary ordinary people share the same kind of passion for what they do as the passion that I have for what I do.
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| Overlooked New York art by Zina Saunders |
Q2.5. Around the time that I met you as a student, You were working on a series of animations for Mother Jones. How many animations did you make every week? How did you balance a schedule to begin with!?
ZS: I did one political animation a week for Mother Jones. I wrote them, acted them, drew the art and then animated every one of them and I did it every week for about three years, I think. The hardest part was actually finding topics to make political cartoons about every week. I would comb through everything I could find online reading all the big newspapers and all the small newspapers in an effort to find something that resonated for me and that I could think up a good gag about. When I first started doing them I had no idea how to do animations the first one I did was Rick Santorum and I did it as an animated gif. After that one I began trying to use after effects and I must admit my first efforts were pretty laughable in away that I wasn't shooting for. But as Time went by I got better at it and eventually found myself having a blast. Here's a link to some of them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFBBC9816396DAD7B
After the era of Mother Jones I began doing animated political cartoons with the final addition which was a satirical online publication created by one of the founders of National Lampoon Tony Hendra and Jeff Kreisler. They provided me with hilarious tapes that I would cartoonize. I loved working with them. Here's a link to them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLxsksOOM3kYup4R5zXFeB90WR0LCvm7_
Q2.6. I looked on to Wikipedia and found out that you contributed art work for Magic: The Gathering and created an updated look for The Pink Panther, so I wanted to know from the source, the one and only, is it true? Did wikipedia get that information right? If so, what other projects have you worked on ?
ZS: I've worked on a bunch of stuff over my career: I've done a lot of trading cards like the updated Mars Attacks and RPG art like Battle Tek, Lord of the Rings, comic book covers, regular book covers, theater posters and lots of portraits of politicians and actors and other notable figures for magazines and newspapers.
Q2.7. What are some of the challenges that you face when creating pieces of work? How do you start your process ? Do you begin with sketches first? or do you just make up whatever comes to mind and see what comes out of it?
ZS: Well it's hard to answer that question now because I'm not doing illustration anymore, I'm doing personal paintings. The way I work now is I just paint the way I feel. I try not to think about what some imagined audience is going to say about the painting I'm working on, I try to just be honest and do what I think looks nice or interesting or that feels expressive of how I'm feeling inside. When I was doing illustration, I had to think about what my client wanted so the whole time I was very conscious of needing to please someone – otherwise I wouldn't get paid. Most of the time I was able to do something that I liked a lot and that they liked too.
But sometimes that wouldn't be the case. Sometimes I would have to hand in a picture that I wasn't so crazy about. Back when I was starting out, I used to do a lot of paintings for postage stamps for countries other than the US. Back in those days there was no email or FTP sites to deliver the art to clients, so I used to deliver the work in person to art directors. One time I delivered a painting that was not really that great. When the art director lifted up the paper covering the art to take a look, he said, "Oh, this looks great!" and I said "You think so? I wasn't so crazy about it." As soon as those words left my lips I knew I had made a big mistake. And sure enough, the art director paused and said, "Hmmmm...you're right, you better take it back and make a few corrections." So that taught me one of the most valuable lessons of my career: absolutely never express any doubt about the work you're handing in!
Q2.8. What has been the most rewarding experience for you as an artist?
ZS: I think just being able to paint pictures every day has been a gas. I couldn't have asked for a better life of work.
Q2.9. Is there any upcoming projects that you have down the pipeline that readers should keep an eye out for?
ZS: Well, if they're interested they could check my website http://www.zinasaunders.com and my blog, https://zinasaunders.blogspot.com/, where I often post my latest paintings.
Q3. What drives you in your daily life?
ZS: I don't know, I just love painting pictures.
Q4. What made you the person that you are today?
ZS: My mom and my dad.
Q5. If you could speak to any living creator or inspiration, who would it be, why, and what would talk to them about?
ZS: I don't know that I really want to talk to creators, I think I'd rather just enjoy their creations. Sometimes when I find out information about creators whose work I've admired, I discover that they're kind of awful and I regret knowing anything at all about them, because it colors the way I look at their work. So I'd rather know them by their work than by having a conversation with them.
Q6. If there were any deceased creators , actors, singers, writers, etc that you would want to speak to, who would it be, and why?
ZS: I haven't really got a different answer for this.
Q7. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
ZS: I think I'd go back in time to before the 2016 presidential election, when we didn't have a psychotic moron in the White House.
Q8. What is one thing that you fear?
ZS: Well, since we're on the subject, that the psychotic moron in the White House will be reelected.
Q9. If you had a superpower what would it be and why?
ZS: My superpower would be to De-Trump the world.
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| Obama art by Zina Saunders |
Q10. What catches your attention when you meet people?
ZS: I live in the country now so I don't meet that many people.
Q11. What is one word of advice that you would impart to your younger self?
ZS: Courage!
Q12. What are three books that you always remember or return to, and why? How did they shape you?
ZS: Well I don't know how much any books have actually shaped me, but I do know that I love "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves (which I've read at least twice), and Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake", which I loved so much I did several animations based on it, you can see them here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLxsksOOM3kbnDlg2V38U4z9SgdtuOwgd .
Q13. If you could continue or remake a movie, or franchise, what would be your film of choice ?
ZS: Since I just mentioned Oryx and Crake, I guess that's the one I'd like to do.
Q14. If you were to make a film, novel, or comic book based on an album, what album or artist would you pick?
ZS: Maybe I'd go back to my youth and do an animated movie based on Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles.
Q15. Who In this life, has motivated you to stay true to what makes you who are?
ZS: My much-loved husband, Barry.
Q16. Where do you hope to see yourself in five years?
ZS: Still above ground.
Q17. What are three albums or songs currently, that you listen to on repeat? And why?
ZS: I have been listening almost incessantly to Wynton Marsalis Jazz in Marciac 2009 (Part 2); here's the link on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88nd_H9q3K0
Q18. What color speaks to you the most and why?
ZS: I used to be very fond of turquoise and purple as a combination but lately I've been more drawn to a kind of light yellow. I think it reminds me of a dress I had when I was a very little girl, like maybe four or five years old. I don't really find that much opportunity to use it but I think about it and try to incorporate it, when I can.
Q19. What is your greatest weakness?
ZS: Insecurity.
Q20. What is your greatest strength?
ZS: Honesty.
Q21.What's one thing that you're proud of?
ZS: That I've made a living as an artist.
Q22. What is a mantra that you tell yourself?
ZS: Don't quit before the miracle.
Q23. What is success to you?
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| Art by Zina Saunders |
http://www.zinasaunders.com/
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