Inside Noah Hilsenrad's Sketchbook

Michael Robinson

[RS Gallery] • Noah Hilsenrad, born in San Francisco, has been a native New Yorker since he moved there in 1981, when he was 3 years old. He didn’t do much but read and draw up until middle-school. Then he went to LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, started learning about art, and discovered traveling. Since he didn’t get into the Cooper Union he went to Parsons (for Communication Design), lived in Barcelona for a year right after
that, and now he does work as a designer and artist while living in Brooklyn. He also moves yearly or more and loves playing Capoeira. His work can be found at www.logicontrol.net.


MR: What's your personal mantra?

Don't be lazy.

What does the role of Artist mean to you?

When I was younger it meant that as an artist it was your job to be see the world differently for other people, even if you were destined for perpetual alienation. Now it means a lot of other less teen-angsty things as well. One of them is understanding what it means to be a human being.

What is the driving force behind your creativity?

I'm not sure I understand my creativity very well. Sometimes it grows from profound happiness or grief, sometimes from outside inspiration, sometimes from a need to see things around me change. Right now I'm seeing it as a function of communication between my subconscious/soul/self and my waking mind.

What transformative experiences have influenced your life and how has that manifested in your work?

Profound experiences of love, death, learning and friendship have gradually moved my work away from being merely technically proficient. Toward what exactly is the question I ask myself every day.

How long does it take you on average to complete a piece of work, and do you ever do several pieces simultaneously?

An average "piece" of work, say a drawing, can take just a few hours, even minutes. And every artist works on things simultaneously. This question reminds me of a story... An artist was commissioned by a wealthy man to paint a crane, in exchange for a large sum of money. After a month the man visited the artist to see how the painting was coming, but found no work in progress. He left bewildered. The following month he visited again, but still nothing. This happened for several months more, until the wealthy man grew quite angry. He felt he was being cheated. He came to the artist's house and demanded his crane or his money. The artist went to his canvas and in a few strokes created a perfect likeness of a crane that poetically captured the very essence of the creature. Despite the crane's beauty, the wealthy man was enraged. Before he could protest, the artist went to his cabinet and opened the door. Thousands of paintings of cranes spilled out of it.

Why should people check out your work?

People should look at my work (at least these pieces) if they like Pop Art, comics, tattoos, and wonderful creatures. But also because art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it needs to be seen to exist.

How does your work affect Consciousness, and what are your views on the evolution of consciousness?

I’m not sure how my work effects consciousness… perhaps this series will cause people to discover/reexamine the incredible work of Jack Kirby, and thereby Pop/comic art as well. Maybe they’ll think about spirituality a little differently when they see spiritual art that doesn’t live in a church. As for my views on the evolution of consciousness: I believe that it does evolve, partly as an adaptation to outside forces like technology, growing population, a changing environment, etc. But I also believe that we never truly understand the consciousness of another era or place, only it’s physical artifacts, and we can only understand the current state of consciousness by experiencing it.