Q & A with Destiny Davison

 

I don't know about you, but most of the gifts I gave last holiday season were made by local artists. It's a great way to support artists and also give unique memorable gifts. For my youngest niece, I picked up a pin from Gamut Gallery made by Destiny Davison featuring one of her signature quirky characters. My niece absolutely loved the pin and wore it proudly to school. However, she eventually lost it on the school bus and was pretty upset. Being the super great uncle that I am, I set out to replace the pin. This gave me a great excuse to catch up with Destiny since we last worked together on the 2020 MPLSART Sketchbook Project. Our great conversation is recapped below. Enjoy.

Destiny Davison is a cartoonist and multimedia maker from Minnesota. She grew up drawing on walls and now does her best to draw on paper or digital screens, mostly. Her work explores the cross sections of the real, the unreal, and the in-between that often involves monsters, snails, anthropomorphic blobs, or other folks of that ilk. 

Image courtesy of the artist

 

 

Blaine Garrett: How did you get your start in the visual arts?

Destiny Davison: Gradually, and in some ways, by accident. Drawing and sketching is something I’ve done since I was a kid to pass the time and to have fun, all in the margins of school books, binders, and on walls. My parents have a collection of comics I created growing up, made with crayon on binder paper and stapled together in all the wrong places. However, my first love was writing. I read all throughout middle school and high school, mostly YA Fantasy. I then went to the University of Minnesota for English with a whole plan to write my own epic saga upon graduation. That didn’t happen, which was a good thing. Throughout that time I kept thinking that being able to see the stories and characters I was writing about would be cool. Then it hit me that maybe I should try doing that. That meant refining my style in ink (and later digital art), making short comics, and gradually taking my first steps into animation. Looking back now, every time I’ve added a new medium into my work, it’s been like discovering something magical, a whole world in a closet or down a rabbit hole. That excitement of being somewhere new, somewhere that makes you re-examine or interpret things in a different way, continues to inform my work and what mediums I might use to “tell the story.” Cartooning especially combines so much of what I’m fascinated by in one-go; writing, visual narrative, character. It’s all there. 

 

Image courtesy of the artist

 

 

BG: How has your work evolved over time?

DD: I’ve spent most of my time so far going, “why not?” First, it was in making the decision to move from writing to visual art and then slowly intersecting the two. Next, it was letting one take the lead over the other, just to see what might happen. Particularly when it comes to working in a new medium, there’s a focus on building technique, understanding, and adapting your style to that format. However, there’s also a big dose of guessing involved as well as pure curiosity for that other dimension of creativity. That’s been exactly the case with animation, for me. 

While the technical aspect of animation can be time-consuming or tedious no matter what program or practical tools you use, the potential of seeing your work come to life in that way is so exciting and (apologies in for the pun) so moving. I’ve been grateful to collaborate with several local musicians (Greg Walker, Dante Pirtle, and my brother Mychael Gabriel) who let me animate videos for their brilliant songs. This adds even more layers to explore and work with. The rhythms, lyrics, and messaging all inform the animation — what’s needed, what’s not, what visual approach to take or opportunities to push your own style to places it hasn’t been before. 

Honestly, as a younger person, the fear of not being good enough or not having the most formal training, kept me from acknowledging my own value, voice, and creative perspective. I’ll admit that a big driver in the work I do now is about acknowledging those earlier versions of myself and wanting to do right by her and the dreams she had that she didn’t think were possible. It’s my way of maybe letting her know that trying was worth it.

 

Image courtesy of the artist

 

 

BG: What inspires your work?

DD: Right now, I’m thinking about the absurdity of life and how we’re all stuck together on a tiny little ball suspended in a void just making the best of it. As a person, that is both a terrifying and comforting concept. This is a good reminder that when I’m making new work, it doesn’t exist in a bubble, and it is directly informed by not only my own personal experience, but by the shared experience of being.

 

Image courtesy of the artist / www.theanywherereport.com

 

 

BG: I find your work to be very happy and full of joy which has been a welcome respite over the past few years. However, it often also has important messaging. Could you talk about your relationship with joy and humor as a communication tool?

DD: I find the world to be a very funny and strange little place, so it has been nice to know I’m far from alone in that. Humor, even silliness, is so important that sometimes I think it gets discounted and often excluded when conversations turn serious. I find the lines between humor and drama, laughing and crying, to be very close and very thin. Joy, like sadness, is a deeply rooted emotion. Yes, recognizing the value in both has been important for me in my creative work, but also in life. 

Laughter is such an integral part of processing information, whether making it easier for us to get through our day or provide some relief. It's also an experience that we can all do together, which then reveals a path forward on things we have to address as a society but so often need something to help break the ice. Humor does that well. That said, humor isn’t all escapism, just like sadness, or seriousness, aren’t just “bummers.” There’s also a humbling aspect to these emotions — in order to laugh, you have to get out of your own way and allow the moment to happen. If you need to cry, you need to let the tears go, rather than shutting them in. Either way, crying or laughing, both are trying to help you process something important.

 

BG: Being a visual storyteller, how do you see your relationship with the “viewer” and how do you think it differs from that of more traditional media artists, etc?

DD: Life is already strange, so there is a lot of material to work with, to explore, and to interpret. I’d be lying if I said none of my current characters or stories had anything to do with my own history, people I’ve met, or moments that have stuck out over the years and made me go, “remember this, you’ll need it later.” Truthfully, just one character might end up being an amalgamation of personalities, memories, and facts. In that way, they become their own walking, talking, little world. 

As a cartoonist, I find some overlap with filmmaking. Instead of a camera, we’re using lines, colors, and shading to build out entire narratives and perspectives, and typically much more than one at a time. Each page warrants its own range of precision, composition, care, and feeling. Cartoons as a medium offer a powerful space to explore a full range of emotion and experience with the tools that feel right to you, whether pen and paper, digital applications, or something in between. 

To the question, I don’t see much separation, if any, between the perceived viewer and artist. Art and creativity are shared experiences, built and sustained by one another. It’s communal rather than a vehicle for one artists’ intention. There’s already at least two people involved, coming to it with their own unique perspectives. That combined with all the memories, relationships, and experiences comprising who they are in that moment in time make things personal very quickly. Nobody is separate or above. We’re doing this together.  

Speaking for myself, my favorite cartoons and comic media probably varies widely in perceived technical excellence. However, they all made me feel something I couldn’t forget, reminded me of something I’ve been through, someone I’ve known, or made me take another look at an element of our very real world and go, “Oh, I didn’t consider that. I will now. Thank you for sharing.” 

 

Image courtesy of the artist / Autoptic Festival 2022

 

 

BG: There is this general expectation that artists have a consistent polished style and to only show off their best work. As someone who explores a lot of different media and shares a lot of in-progress work, what are your thoughts on these types of expectations?

DD: You can try to take the “social” out of “social media” as hard as you want, but I just don’t think it’s that simple. Something gives. I do feel that for as long as there is a digital landscape, having agency in what I share and how I share it is something I don’t want to lose. I try to approach social media in a similar way to tabling at a comic convention or market. We are there to sell our work, of course, but we’re also introducing ourselves and our art, and (hopefully) meeting some new friends while we’re at it. We're all sketching or doodling while sitting in pop-up chairs as the time ticks by between sales. 

Whether somebody is meeting me for the first time in person or online, I try to ask myself how I would welcome them to my table? How would I say "hello"? Now, I’m not in the camp that believes that that introduction has to be perfect or polished. Even in a physical space, there is awkwardness: a poster stand that doesn’t quite stand up straight, signs written in sharpie because you ran out of time to laminate anything, etc. However, you made it there, that’s good, and through the mistakes you learn what works and is most true for you. 

When I post something “in-process” online, say a sketch or rough animation, it’s a reminder for me that making art takes time and that one piece is probably going to keep evolving all the way up to its polished, final state, and maybe even after. And that’s okay. For me, the process of making and the act of presenting are things I prefer to keep close together and the curtain between them fairly transparent.

 

Image courtesy of the artist

 

 

BG: You recently had your work on a billboard near the MN State Fairgrounds. Could you talk about how that came to be?
DD: The billboard I made this year was in response to the subject of reproductive health care and was sponsored by The Minnesota Billboard Project, which is run by Kristen Brietzke and Kelly Searle. For years now, they have been bringing creative folks together to produce billboards across Minnesota with a goal to inspire progressive social change. We’re lucky to have them here.

I’ve been grateful to participate in the project in some form for the past three years. The themes we’ve focused on ranged from healthcare access to voting freedom to the right to choose our own futures. When we bring up the purpose of a billboard, we might first think of advertisements, somebody selling or promoting something. I’m so thankful for the MN Billboard Project’s leadership standing against that and utilizing billboards as a space for messages that should be front of mind and perspectives that may go undervalued or unacknowledged otherwise. 

For my billboard this year, “Choice is Precious,” I opted to illustrate four different pathways that reproductive health care make possible for a person. What first came to mind was the day-to-day aspects that don’t always get discussed, particularly in the political landscape — being together with friends, getting a routine checkup at your local reproductive clinic, planning for the future as an individual or with your partner(s). All of these moments involve people, each with their own stories and realities, and choices they deserve to have access to and make free of judgment. 

The other billboard designed this year was by the fantastic KT Lindemann, and states “Every Body Deserves the Right Care” with illustrated people of all ages and backgrounds surrounding the text. Art is a personal act, but it’s also a public act. It is something shared that hopefully offers some tools for progress and provides space to better focus on each other instead of making generalizations or assumptions. I do believe all forms of art have the capacity to do this, whether cartoon, illustration, painting, sculpture, or on walls, on scratch paper, or billboards.

 

Image courtesy of the artist/Paid for by MNBillboardProject.org

 

 

BG: How can folks best support you and your practice right now?

DD: You can find me and my work online at www.destinydavison.com, and on Instagram at @destinyadavison. Right now I’m focusing in on this place call The Anywhere Report, which basically asks, “if everything and anything were possible, how would we talk about it?” So far, that’s meant new stories about dinosaurs changing toothpaste brands, anthropomorphic rocks, and snails that judge your every life decision. Stay tuned at @anywherereport. 

 

BG: Thanks for taking the time to talk more about your practice with MPLSART. 

DD: Thank you! I’m a big fan of everything MPLSART, and glad to be here. 

 

Image courtesy of the artist

 

p.s. I know you are dying to find out. Yes, Destiny was able to hook me up with a new pin and my niece is proudly sporting it around school again.  You can pick up your own in Destiny's shop. ~ Blaine◼︎