The art of Ryan Heshka: pop surrealism, vintage horror, and femme fatales

Transmission 164: Interview with Ryan Heshka

Ryan Heshka is an artist and illustrator whose surrealistic artwork integrates comics, science fiction, and pop culture. He is self-taught as an artist and has formal training in interior design. His love of exquisite typography enabled him to include several styles into his artwork, giving it the look of a phony pulp cover or magazine. He is trying to eliminate any formality in his artwork and enjoys strange situations and strange, surprising, casual compositions. Ryan Heshka’s artwork with distinctive retro dynamism is considered to be pop surrealism for his scenes, humor, pop culture references and visual language similar to comics and cartoons.

Cut off from the idea of control, he traverses the bizarre, insane, and surreal. In his universe, spooky apparitions lurk in the shadows and femme fatales become involved in unexplained events. He produces captivating pictures that let the audience fill in most all of the details or most of the blanks. Ryan Heshka arrived where he is via a very indirect route, which led him to create and merge entangled complex contemporary issues surrounding the nature of liberty and its related social constructs, including; identity, privacy, and conformity. His main characters, art, and all the narratives across his body of art have an underlying theme of rebellion and rejection of authority and social norms.

He created the “Mean Girls Club: Pink Dawn” comic book and graphic novel and self-published the comic book, “Frog Wife.” Both “MGC” and “Frog Wife” significantly reference horror comics from the 1950s, which capture the brutality and paranoia of the time while also rejecting its traditional depictions of women as mothers and housewives. He is also the author of a series of paintings called ‘Freeks’, celebrating weirdos, oddballs and personal own individual uniqueness in a world torn by conformity versus chaos. His illustrations have notably appeared in Vanity Fair, Playboy, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, the New York Times, Smart Money, and on the cover and interiors of BLAB!. He has been selected to appear in American Illustration, Society of Illustrators, and Communication Arts. As a professional artist in addition to gallery shows across North America and Europe.  Ryan Heshka also works on picture book projects for children as well as adults. Downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery since February 1st shows Costume Obscura, featuring his new artworks. Costume Obscura marks the artist’s third solo show at CHG. Ryan Heshka is based and lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Ryan Heshka‘s Instagram | BigCartel

Can you tell a bit about your beginning and what was the main impulse and inspiration behind your decision to become an artist? Have you been fascinated by surrealist imagery, illustrations, and science fiction since your childhood?

Like most children, I enjoyed drawing at a very young age. But being an introverted child, from a family where we didn’t talk about feelings or deal with personal issues, drawing became an escape for me. It was a world, perhaps the only world, that I really understood or felt comfortable in. This comfort in drawing persisted as an adult, even after trying other professions. Perhaps I escaped back into drawing after my taste of the “real world”. So, the art life wasn’t so much a decision as a default. I just never stopped drawing.

Growing up in the 1970s, I began to seek out books in the local library that related to things I liked: mostly old monster movies and comic books. King Kong (1933) and Star Wars were my gateways to the past. Specifically, I received the Star Wars Album book for Christmas around the time it first hit the theaters. This book featured many of George Lucas’ influences, but the image that stuck with me was an old Amazing Stories cover with a magnetic floating globe pulling an ocean liner to an alien world, while nude winged women looked on. The art was by Frank R. Paul, perhaps my greatest artistic influence. There was something particularly wonderous about that cover that turned me onto the boundless nature of art.

Since “Mean Girls Club: Pink Dawn” coincided with the rise of Trump, Brexit, and other swelling global social/political issues, Ryan Heshka felt the urge to realize a love letter to the old comics that he grew up with. 

Your artwork draws inspiration from mid-century pulp magazines, vintage comics, and noir aesthetics. What is it about these eras that continues to fascinate you? What do you enjoy the most in reinterpreting them for contemporary audiences?

The eras and genres you mention hold a very strong quality of visual narrative for me. Whether it’s a single image like a cover or movie poster, or a series of images like film noir or comics, I find the sense of mystery and wonder of that material from that time intoxicating. Not all popular art from that period has that quality, but the best examples are like a dream. The original intention of these art forms was to draw the viewer/reader in and shake some money out of their pockets. But out of their original context and many decades later, these works hold up on their own as art. In my opinion, the removal of the context can actually give them more intrigue and weight, as the viewer can fill in their own narrative. As well, the colors, characters, action and typography of that era have always appealed to me, just as someone might be curious and fascinated with a country and culture they have never visited.

I use this feeling, this sense of wonder, as the basic approach to my art. Initially when I started painting personal art for my own amusement, they were more literal representations of the typical pulp tropes: robots, aliens, spacemen, and so on. This quickly became not enough for me. I started to twist the tropes into more unexpected, dream-like scenes, but keeping the basic pulp language intact. I continue to try to push this approach further and further, challenging myself to stay tethered to my root inspirations while creating something hopefully new and fresh and strange. I often dream of finding old comics and magazines, the imagery of which often finds its way into my work.

Considering your background in interior design, how does that training influence your creativity? Are there any lesser-known or unexpected sources that consistently spark your imagination?

I am totally self-trained as an artist and illustrator, so interior design provided me with a base education in fine arts and art history, a knowledge of architecture and design, color theory, and so much more that I use daily in my work. Perhaps it was a blessing not to have formal art training, so I did not have to unlearn as much to develop my own voice. I just let my visual voice be heard from the beginning. It was the only visual voice I have had. It is with age that I can look back and realize how many other indirect influences I draw from, such as nature (specifically pond life), weather (I grew up in the prairies with very long winters), and ordinary people. I continually unlock inspiration in the world around me. My latest solo exhibition was very fashion-curious.

‘Fatales – The Art of Ryan Heshka’ a monograph book volume of 256 page is a collection of his personal work, dating back from 2005,  covering many genres, from pulp and comic inspired art, to femme fatales, to his dreamscape-inspired oil paintings.

You frequently blend vintage aesthetics with surreal elements. How do you balance the pre-planning of those vintage details with the spontaneous nature of surreal creation?

If there is that balance in my work, it’s purely by trial and error. I really don’t put too much thought into a specific message or narrative, but react to ideas and details visually, combining them to see what works together. And when I say “works together”, I mean that for whatever reason, the visual elements feel right to me. Those visual elements also need to support the core action or subject of the initial idea or mood. I have to allow myself to feel surprised as I am working on a piece, or I don’t feel the viewer or reader will be surprised. Often, the elements will work together not because of their relation, but because they DON’T relate to each other. At least, not relatable on the surface.

Your color palette and textures evoke a nostalgic yet otherworldly atmosphere. Can you walk us through your creative process, from the initial concept to the final piece?

The process is very different from piece to piece, and therein lies the frustration and the joy of making art! It can start with me mixing a few colors and just moving paint around, not knowing what the end image will be. It can also involve numerous studies, layout sketches, color swatches, and photoshop as preparatory stages before I move into the final painting. I am not an artist that has a disciplined work flow. Consistently, the work does begin with a small sketch idea, a seed, that gives me the starting point.

My most helpful tool lately is my idea morgue: sketchbooks and folders full of sketches I have made over the years of random ideas, details, figures, patterns, etc. Often, I may have an idea for a painting, but details will be filled in by pouring through the idea morgue and taping fragments to the wall. In this way, I have visuals that I can start to play off of each other. I can quickly see what is working and what is not. I don’t work from a blueprint, but rather from bread crumbs.

There’s a mix of humor, horror, and satire in your work and many of your characters are powerful, rebellious, or subversive females. How do you approach the depiction of women in your art, and what stories are you trying to tell through them?

I like to answer this question by saying that when I first started painting, I depicted many women getting abducted by robots or alien lifeforms, borrowing from a very common pulp theme. But this flipped at some point, and the women in my paintings became the ones doing the abducting. In other words, recycling the old pulp tropes was not only outdated, but was also somewhat misogynistic and uninteresting. I obviously love old pop culture, but much of it was male created for a male audience, and often quite one dimensional. I had to dig deeper to discover the work of female artists in that 1930s to 50s range who were strong, rubbing censors the wrong way, and expressing themselves authentically. The comic work of Tarpe Mills comes to mind, or Mae West’s racy performances that got her banned from radio. Or the surreal paintings of Kay Sage. I began to discover the strong, unique, creative female energy that existed during that early part of the 20^th century.

I do not pretend to be any kind of feminist or champion of women. I’m an old white guy. But I do look up to artistic, pioneering women with admiration. I try to keep the spirit of those unsung creative women alive in my work. When I make art or comics featuring women, I try to do so with the utmost respect, reverence and joy. Having a daughter has bent my comic work in particular towards an anti-patriarchal narrative, and my pencils are sharpened by the sheer fucking nonsense of a male dominated world that is almost completely broken.

His sketchbooks were filled with fashion-related drawings that he had made over the years, which served as the inspiration for the paintings in Costume Obscura. While collecting “seeds” for the show, he explored his visual inventory, and hazy collages of clothes and characters that resembled paper dolls started to emerge.

Your pieces often feel like they exist in an alternate history of pop culture. They have a cinematic quality, almost like stills from a lost B-movie. Do you ever think of your work as part of a larger, unwritten narrative? Do you see your art as a form of cultural critique?

Cultural critique feels much too lofty a term to put on my art. I think that there is an aspect of that that leaks into my work, only because I am surrounded by this (North American) culture and my brain is a sponge. It can’t help but be in my art to some degree. More accurate is the idea of the larger narrative. I have always loved to create worlds. As a young child, I built cardboard cities, and tried to create a brand of comics resembling the Marvel universe for instance. When I started making art as an adult, I looked to individual comic panels as inspiration. Unintentionally, this provided the framework of a single image sandwiched between two unseen images on either side. You don’t know what is happening in the unseen panels, but there is that opportunity to imagine what came before and what will follow. This ended up becoming my approach to painting.

As a practicing artist who is heavily influenced not by movements but rather by individual style and voice, there is a distinctive aesthetic that binds my works together. My works feel like they are all moments happening at the same time in various corners of my world. There is no definitive narrative, other than what the viewer wishes to imagine. It is an open narrative, with room to interpret. My paintings never come with a printed “statement”, but rather an invitation to dream.

From editorial illustrations to fine art exhibitions, your work spans different fields. How has your creative identity evolved over time? What challenges have you faced in maintaining your distinctive visual language while adapting to new artistic projects and commissions?

Fortunately for me, when projects and commissions come my way, they are usually seeking out my voice. They do not ask me to venture too far into territories and imagery that I am not comfortable with. That being said, my years as a commercial artist have given me the ability to problem solve and answer to specific needs within a project. My biggest challenge at this point is to find projects of interest that would suit my less-than-mainstream style. There are so many avenues for an artist’s work now, but not many of them seem worthwhile or sustainable. Anyone can print their crap on some crap now. This year my goal is to get back to producing comics, which for the foreseeable future will be self-published. It is a luxury right now to not have to deal with any editors, publishers or contracts, and know that I maintain the rights of my properties in full. But there are downsides to that. So hopefully I can plug my comic work into the right publisher at some point. It’s difficult because I want to do soft cover, short comic books (think of the old style drug store comic books), but it seems like the market is oriented towards graphic novels, which demand too much of my time at the present (and not enough of an advance to live off of).

Despite the prevalence of digital art nowadays, your work has a strong foundation in analog aesthetics. What part does nostalgia play in modern visual culture, in your opinion?

For me, nostalgia is a security blanket. It’s soothing, familiar. It brings us back to simplicity, to a moment, to a sensation. Even if it’s something very childish and material, I value nostalgia. I have a small handful of action figures and my Corgi Batmobile in my studio so I can remind myself of the joy I felt as a child, the joy of discovery, of play.I grew up in the 1970s during a huge nostalgia boom. As a child I latched onto the past (1930’s to the 50s) because it was quite prevalent and intriguing. So, oddly, I grew up loving an older generation’s past, embracing their nostalgia. I feel this must be in part why I have such a strong feeling towards art and visuals from before my time. Maybe it was my way of escaping a present that I didn’t fit into. I’m sure some psychotherapist could help me decode all of this.

Photos and illustrations courtesy of Ryan Heshka

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.