DISTORT - A Master of Blending Classical and Street Art
DISTORT | Look out for the full video interview coming soon.
Throughout my years as a young artist, I’ve come across many of my peers who have inspired me to create, explore and delve deeper into the world of my inner imagination. A resident of Jersey City, I’ve found that artists tend to converge in one space after having spent much of their youth in another place entirely. I’ve met artists from Russia, Brazil, France, Haiti, the Philippines and more, yet one of the most influential artists of my time is hands-down my boy, Dave, aka, Distort who spent most of his time in New Jersey and currently lives and works in Jersey City.
“Kingdom” Mural by Holland Tunnel, Jersey City, Distoart.com. (Video Link)
Distort, affectionately known as Disto, is a pure innovator who marries the worlds of classical artistry with the street-art we know today as graffiti. He completed his schooling at the Academy of Fine arts in Pennsylvania and learned the ways of artists past with studies in sculpture, painting, and printmaking. When asked about his time and development as a student, Disto remarked that he was surprised by the environment in which he was one of the only kids who came straight out of high school, rather his classmates were older and continuing their education or pursuing an advancement in a specific field. He noted that the school was very focused on the classical aspect of art and didn’t necessarily offer much in the way of computer arts or new technology.
“It was kind of like being thrown into the city of Philly and finding my own discipline to get what I can out of the curriculum.”
Metal Panels painted with enamel and engraved, Distoart.com
Following his schooling, “Disto developed a body of work combining sculptural installation and painting. In 2016, he presented these now-iconic “scrolls” and “shields” in a solo exhibition at the Works on Paper Gallery in Philadelphia. DISTORT has exhibited extensively in the Tristate Area and completed murals in Miami, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as locations across North Jersey. His project, located just outside of the Holland Tunnel, is one of the largest murals by a single artist in New Jersey. DISTORT continues to create challenging work inspired by his admiration of classicism and the intensity of the present.” (Distoart.com, biography, about)
David vs. Goliath
“This one is for the workers that built the tunnels. This one is for Gene from DPW.
This one is for the David’s throwing rocks at Goliath. This is for those rocks mined from the tunnels being the ones that smash the windows of Kushner’s skyscraper. This one is a reminder that the truth always wins.”
Influence speaks to experience and tells us what an artist has an affinity for and what appeals to them most whether stylistically, technically, or aesthetically. Disto recounted his youth and the influences which drew him to understanding his own decision making regarding colour, line and theme. His biggest influences were graffiti which he’d see while driving through the street of New York City with his parents as well as classical art which was amplified by his love of museums as he would often sit and draw from statues to emulate the greats and long past. He also had an innate love of nature and admiration for comics, all of which playing equal parts in cementing lasting inspiration.
Hoboken Mural, Distoart.com (video link)
Aside from tangible inspiration, Disto was acutely inspired by where he was raised – Hoboken, NJ, as well as where his family moved to, South Orange, NJ. His residence in South Orange was a suburban environment yet it was that coupled with neighboring Newark, NJ (a mere 8 blocks away) which really cemented his acknowledgment and passion for the issues of classism and economic imbalance. Disto was very aware of class differences as well as the fact that a lot of his friends didn’t have the same kind of lifestyle or securities – both factors informed his character and content of his art and instilled a sense of that tension and responsibility to remark on such issues through his art.
DD Mural, JC, Instagram.com/Distoart
Colour is very important to me as an artist, and I was very interested in learning how Disto approached this element in his work. Graffiti and comic books really are influential regarding what colour combinations he’s attached to as he loves high saturation and high impact colour all the way to more rendered or classical looking art:
“In terms of learning how to use colour, the biggest source of information was a class that I took about perception – I had already taken colour theory, found it somewhat useful but the class on perception was like a course on physiology and how the mind works as well as the mechanics of the body’s functions and how complimentary colours play a role through the eye itself. There were certain things that I learned in that class, for example, when you stare at a colour for a really long time you desensitize to it and it stops having the same impact on your brain – the other thing is regarding compliments and how the rods and cones in your eye share compliments; you have the same rod and cone for blue and orange, red and green and then purple and yellow – when you desensitize yourself to blue, you sensitize yourself to orange. It would only take a small drop of orange to have maximum impact in a field of blue -- and these things don’t’ need to be in equal parts to really be effective. Sometimes when I’m painting, I’ll put a small drop of a colour, and it’ll feel so good that I’ll want to keep adding it, but I know it wouldn’t help – actually having the restraint to let one colour really overwhelm the other creates a thirst for the compliment and I try to keep that in mind when thinking about colour.” – DISTO. This dissertation on colour was one of the most insightful, masterful explanations I had ever heard in my life, and it truly imprinted a new understanding of spectrum and relationship.
Distort for Deep Space Gallery, Jersey City, Instagram.com/Distoart
Artists have a responsibility to narrative, people, a place, and history. When asked about the perceived responsibility as an artist to speak up again injustice, imbalance, and other social issues, Disto offered his response with grace and gratitude:
“It’s something that weighs on me a lot – I think that in my art that I make in my studio, I try to really think about the entire world and people that will come after I’m gone and the people that were around before I was born. There’s more time in my studio to think about life on a whole from a very removed and philosophical vantage point -- I think a lot about the past and the future and what my role is, but when I’m doing art in public like murals or graffiti or things that aren’t necessarily optional viewing it’s (like going be out there in the world whether people ask to see it or not), I feel a much more narrow and focused responsibility. Usually, I try to remove myself as much as I’m capable from the assignment and really try to focus on the place and how it exists and how I can change it as little as possible; almost like a preservation task and I think about who lives there or what kind of imagery will speak to the people that will have to look at it every day even if I’m one of them. I try to do research and ask questions, go to the library, or talk to people – every assignment is a little different. There’s one in Philly I did recently that dealt with the opioid epidemic and was right on a block where people go to use. That involved a lot of outreach and painful experiences to witness and hopefully it’s helpful for the mural to be there. I just kind of generally say yes to the fact that there is a responsibility. To be able create art professionally to me I feel like is certainly a privilege and to earn a privilege I feel like I can only feel comfortable with it by giving what I have to offer to the public rather than asserting myself.”
Engraving and enamel on scrolls made from aerosol cans and fire extinguishers, Distoart.com
Disto is a versatile artist and can create using an array of different tools. When asked to narrow down his favourite instruments, he responded with the following:
“I love spray paint – it’s really fun for me because it lays on kind of transparently and fans in the direction that you move your hand. I feel like light kind of does the same thing where there’s the cone of light at the source and it diffuses out over an object -- spray paint is also a cone that comes out from a point, and I feel like with spray paint I can angle the can to the wall and with easy movements mimic light falling on a shape; so, I work a lot from dark to light. I like to use bucket paint in the beginning so that there aren’t a lot of marks so that the marks I create with the can will show up and aren’t fighting for attention. After a long time, I really got used to the idea that the movement of my hand can be equivalent to light hitting a surface. I struggle with paint brushes because you really have to battle the consistency and some people can really do it effortlessly and they have their signature way of working with brushes, but I always feel like I’m not, like I can fight to be competent at it, but I don’t have this natural way with it. With a lot of my fine art I do etching where I engrave into metal either with a Dremel or scribe or sandpaper and that gives me the same feeling that I get with spray paint because a horizontal mark will create much more light because it’s creating these little grooves that are horizontal so the light that’s coming from above will bounce off it -- whereas if it’s a vertical line the light kind of glides down the groove (as) it doesn’t have a little ledge to bounce off onto so by just moving my hand whether it’s with the sandpaper or the Dremel I’m creating light from a darker background and bringing light out so it feels really similar to how I feel spray painting and that’s another technique I feel really good with.”
DISTO
Many of Disto’s premiere works have a stark sense of dimension and perspective and I really wanted to explore his ideation and conception of these types of compositions; I needed to know more about his relationship to perspective and how he confronted those themes.
“Perspective is in all 2D art I think that’s representational; you’re brining somebody into a space, and I don’t do it very subtly -- I try to establish space really early on. Space in a lot of my work has trains, tunnels, or aerial perspective and I think from the artist’s perspective, you give the viewer a lot to imagine, you kind of articulate a lot for the viewer with the least amount of effort by having a compelling perspective -- so with a train or tunnel for example, I can kind of put two lines that go in an A-shape and then some horizontals and then I have some train tracks really quickly in order to produce a compelling image. I think it’s a useful tool and then there’s all these kind of psychological factors for the viewer -- like how does somebody feel entering into an unknown space? If it’s an aerial perspective, I think that has a psychology of its own where you’re able to look down on things in a way that isn’t part of our everyday experience and it’s kind of a perfect tool because you’re getting impact in the viewer and you’re able to create space with sort of just the framework rather than a painting where you’re painting for 6-7 sessions and you’re struggling to create a space because there isn’t an overarching logic to it -- sometimes it helps to have that there to kind of hold everything together.”
Bust of Medusa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Google Arts and Culture
I was compelled to install a segment of the interview dedicated to the notorious, “dead or alive” question. Who would Disto want to work with from any time in history, past or present?
“Probably Bernini or Michelangelo because looking at the technique it still hasn’t been replicated in our current times, I just want to get the secrets of how they can carve something from a block of marble -- it doesn’t really make sense to me but I also really like some more modern artists like Rauschenberg. He would put a bunch of different objects all together on a painting or make these types of assemblages and yeah, I mean I like the idea of getting to meet someone who isn’t here anymore -- I think that would be crazy.”
When it came time for closing remarks, I asked Disto if he had anything he wanted to mention, whether regarding upcoming projects or perhaps something that left a lasting impression. I was pleasantly rewarded with his thoughts on colour, time and linear as well as cyclical relationships between these things:
“So, when we were talking earlier about colour, there’s something else that’s really interesting to me that has to do with colour, which is if you look at most of the artist handbooks, you’ll see a colour wheel -- and that’s a circle that moves through all the colours. If you look through science textbooks, you’ll see that light exists on a spectrum of wavelengths; we’re able to see infrared, well everything that’s up to infrared and shorter than ultraviolet - the circle that we see in the color wheel takes us from the lowest frequency that we see to up to the highest frequency we can see but, in terms of our perception, it makes a full circle, so what appears in one form as a line where it’s clearly going from one end to the other - is a circle. From our experience of colour, if we’re going from blue to purple, and then violet or ultraviolet, the next step on the color wheel would be red - but if you’re at the bottom of it you’ll go from yellow, orange, red, and then it would infrared but if you kept moving away from orange you would get to violet – so where were unable to perceive colour, it actually just connects us back around to the other end of the line segment and to me that alone is really interesting. But something that it made me think about is, I feel like there’s a parallel and that has to do with time. Where my imagination has gone in my studio especially, like when I’m thinking about what kind of look I want to have to my art or what kind of imagery I want to convey with my art, I try to look at time similarly so that it’s both a line as well as a circle and you can get lots of information about the history of humanity, the history of civilization and the further back you go it begins to get really blurry and you get more definitive information -- and all the time they’re finding new discoveries that redate how old humanity is. There’s this kind of information which leads to imagination and when I look into the future I feel that same fog where we can look at the way society is headed but really nobody can predict what’s going to happen in the future -- and we don’t really know so something that informs my art currently is trying to imagine that the ancient past and distant future somehow connect, and that if we went all the way into the future we would find ourselves back in the past before we have records, and a circular understanding of time and similar to colour where it doesn’t really make sense to think that something can be a line but also a circle. I like thinking of time like that so a lot of my paintings will be purposely confusing and that’s kind of the direction I’m going in where what people are wearing or some of the mythology behind it is both kind of almost so current that it’s on the edge of futuristic but also really to remind people of an ancient past and I think that’s kind of the thought that I’m at with most of the projects I’m working on. “
DISTO in his studio, Jersey City
I first met Distort in my hometown nearly 15 years ago. I’ve been one of his biggest fans ever since and this interview has truly given me more than I could ever imagine. To be able to have the opportunity to peer into the mind of your favourite artist (and I’m not just saying this, he is literally one of my top two favourite artists of all time) is genuinely priceless. Distort, along with my husband and myself, have all been friends for nearly two decades. We “run” with the same circle, and all have tremendous respect for one another. I’ve attended countless exhibitions throughout the years, here in Jersey City and New York City, as well as Philadelphia, PA. He’s invited myself and the husband to the opening of an upcoming release in PA and I know it’ll be absolutely wonderous. He’s changed the landscape of art in my eyes, and I think he’s here to change the world.
