Fly Interviews: Sara Blake, For the Love of ZSO

So Its finally here! The wait is over! Brought to you on golden wings, the interview with one of the dopest artists out right now! Sara Blake!!!! Check it out!

AF: When did you learn to draw?

SB: I still haven't learned to draw! I just do the best I can, and try to always play a little. Freestyle. But I guess I learned that I liked to draw when I was very little. I feel very fortunate to have gone to a school that valued the arts since day one in kindergarten. I'm sure I didn't appreciate it at the time, but If you showed an interest in the arts, the support was always there. I will remember all my art teachers names and faces until the day I die. I'm still learning every day. I hope to never stop.

AF: How long did you attend the New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized study?

SB: I went to Gallatin for 4 years for my undergraduate program. Gallatin's program gives its students full reign of all of NYU's courses and departments so that you can essentially invent your own major. It was a good place for someone like me who had lots of interests and needed a way stitch them together.

AF: How did you come up with the name ZSO?

SB: Snagged from my site, because I don't know how else to say it: "ZSO, pronounced “zo” zō is a collection of letters that I find beautiful, and together make a sound much like “so” which as you English speakers may recognize means “to such a great extent” or something of the like. I am a person of extremes, for better or worse (most often the latter), so the ring of it is fitting."

AF: So who is Sarah Blake lol?

SB: Well with an H, you would be talking about the adult film star, of course—the foremost reason why I don't work under my real name.

AF: Oops, Sorry for the mis-spelling.... lol

AF: How did you come up with your logo?

SB: I've had a few incarnations of my logo but the one I use on my blog and business card was a hand drawn type experiment that I colored and textured digitally. It was just something small that was inked and water colored in a notebook and I decided I liked it enough to use it. I love hand drawn typography in general—I like the idea of giving a unique identity to a letter in time and space. If you draw the letter 'A' on a napkin, no one will ever be able to draw that same 'A' again, at least not at the same moment or in the same place. Computers change the way we look at type. We lose the nuances of handwriting, so I wanted to try to at least make a digital hybrid.

AF: Is your artwork displayed anywhere besides your site?

SB: I'm very very excited to be in the latest Curvy, 6th edition 2009 book which features 120 artists from 39 countries. (It's out now; visit yenmag.com for details!). ZSO just had a featured interview at Design Taxi and another at Dot Design, but mostly my work is just on my site and blog. The majority is personal work, so it just hangs out at my site.

AF: What made you start a blog?

SB: I started my blog after I quit my previous job in interactive design last year. I was feeling a little beat down and creatively drained, and I wasn't drawing much anymore. I was having a lot of trouble getting rolling again. I was constantly dissatisfied with my work, and would consequently never finish anything. Fear of failure paralyzed me, and I needed a way to get unstuck. I decided to start a blog as a means of self publication. It gave me a sense of finality: "Time to stop editing. Once people see this, you can't keep changing it." My blog helped me get over quite a bit of stage fright as well. It naturally turned into a place to share inspiration and post work updates and news.

AF: What are your inspirations, for your artwork?

SB: Pretty girls, music, New York City, textures, line, collage. It really varies and tends to be a fairly random collection of whatever I've been looking at. Lately, grungy architectural detail—stuff like wrought iron, wood floors, chipped paint, walls that have seen a few storms. No kidding, I've been really in love with an old window in the bathroom at my job! Flukes, mistakes, inconsistencies. Oh, and did I mention pretty girls?

AF: So from one tattoo head to another, how many do you have?

SB: Hmmmm... 7 total? All animals, all my buddies, all with names.

AF: Are any of your tattoos, your artwork?

SB: Definitely not! I love traditional American and Japanese tattoos, but I could never draw them myself. I leave that up to my buddy Steve Boltz. He is my tattoo consultant of sorts. He does all my work and helps me plan for the next thing. Steve is the man! (Smith Street Tattoo Parlour, Brooklyn)

AF: What's your favorite piece of artwork done by you?

SB: I don't have a favorite. I think every time I start something new it's the favorite, and then it passes and it's time to make something new again. It just feels good to take various unrelated things from my world and put them together in a way that maybe makes sense, at least at the time. It's more of a puzzle, but once it's done, it's no fun anymore.

AF: What about yourself sets you apart from other artist in this world?

SB: My work is a combination between hand drawn, watercolor, digital painting, and digital images I shoot with my camera. It's a lot of cause/effect—the way one medium is set down will effect the choices for the next medium and so on. Some of the textures in my work might be something I saw on the way to get my coffee in the morning. If I took a different way to the coffee shop that day, the art would be different, so in that sense, my work is more about where I've been. And no one walks the same path in life. Maybe I'm not doing anything fancy artistically, but I know that my work has to be unique because its ingredients were there only there when I happened to come by and snag them.

AF: How do you start your art masterpieces?

SB: Masterpiece might be a bit of a hyperbole, but I'll take what I can get! I tend to start with several reference images, usually random things that catch my eye from either magazines or the Internet. I'll use them as a jumping off point and I'll just draw pretty loosely with pencil and will erase if I need. It's touchy feely, no system. I like to keep it messy since I have to pay so much attention to detail at my day job.

AF: I always ask the people I interview, What does it mean to be "Fly"?

SB: The "flyest" people I know, are very discreetly "fly." They march to the beat of their own drum, but softly, quietly, so we can barely even hear.

AF: And last but not least, What do you think about "Antique Flyness"?

SB:Antique Flyness : kicks :: ZSO : boots
If I were a dude I think I might have a serious shoe shopping problem thanks to Antique Flyness. Big thanks. Keep up the good work!