The Miami Art Blog by Heike Dempster

It goes back to school, I guess. I always had a passion for painting and art but then, when I was in college, I focused more towards graphic design. I realized I could not really do both. It was difficult to graduate in both majors. It would take me forever so I put art to the side and focused on design. I graduated and worked in advertising for a couple of years and then I realized I was kind of miserable. I was living with my mom at the time so I was able to save enough money to quit and focus on my art. I have been doing that since 2008. Really glad I did. That’s kind of how I got started.

Some highlights of my career have been getting into mural painting. My first one was in 2009. A lot of my graffiti writer friends were always encouraging me to take my stuff out to the streets and I finally did. I was really nervous. A blank canvas is already intimidating for me so a blank wall was even more so.

To me, the scale and being in public. It’s not my favorite thing. I still prefer to paint in the privacy of my studio. You are vulnerable. People see your progress and the mistakes. I kind of get uncomfortable and it is really hard to cover up. I feel like, don’t look at me, don’t look at me. It’s stressful because you always have an audience. It’s something you have to get used to. Also, it’s different materials. I am still getting comfortable with the spray cans. I am still trying to figure out my technique when it comes to murals.

I have always been inspired by Disney. I have always liked the little mermaid. It is one of my favorite cartoons. When I started painting the girls in high school I had a fascination with the fantastical. Fairies and mermaids. The whole mermaid mural thing lately though, I think it happened while I was living in New York. That was my way of feeling nostalgic of Miami. The ocean and stuff like that. It is just like a fluid figure for a while. It seems appropriate for Miami. It is funny that I never really considered that but now people are like, oh, do you want to paint a mermaid? I am kind of falling into the category of mermaid painters. It’s funny.

Yes.

The ocean. That was the one thing I missed when I was gone. We live really far away from the ocean right now but we try. It’s therapy. Going out there and that’s our back yard and being able to relax and take that all in.

We were homesick. We did not ever mean to leave Miami permanently. Miami is always home but we wanted to experience living outside of this city for a little bit. The weather was a big factor. The lifestyle in New York was just too difficult.

I wouldn’t really know because I am a homebody. I wouldn’t get out much. The one thing I did notice was that a lot of the art work I loved and a lot of the artists I am a fan of would exhibit there, where in Miami, you only see them during Basel time. It was always cool to attend an opening and meet them because they were going to be there.

There is so many. When it comes to street muralists, I love Miss Van’s work. I love her canvas gallery work and her murals. I love Glenn Brown. I like the color palettes of different artists. Right now I like Eric Jones. There are just so many.

Yes, for the most part. It has always kind of been women or animal based. In my work, I always try to tie in females with nature. I remember in school I was always fascinated by drawing animals. I would always draw cheetahs and tigers and birds. Then it became women.

I guess it was just something that happened but it ties into Mother Nature.

She is someone that kind of just came up. People always ask if it is a self-portrait but they are not meant to be. My more recent work, it depends on the meaning and what I am going through. Maybe I put something of myself in the work but the figure is not necessarily me but the message or the symbolism is.

I never really thought about it that way. They are not supposed to be. They look the same and that’s something I want to work on more and use actual models as my reference.

It’s funny because each piece is inspired by something super random. It could be a lyric in a song or a quote in a movie. I am really into folklore and mythology, especially from Latin America, Mexico and South America. If it is just a little tale that I heard or read somewhere, I like to base the piece off of that but I let the viewer interpret it themselves. They do come up to me and ask me and some of them do have a back story. It depends.

I don’t know. I am excited. I kind of have a little time off because last year was a crazy one with deadlines. I am looking forward to just be experimenting and see where it goes from here. I always stay figurative for the most part.

The oil paint.

I love to blend and render and oil paint is just super creamy. It’s my favorite medium. It allows itself to get smooth and blend and it is forgiving and it smells nice. It reminds me of school.

I actually met Wayne, who is the artist who represented the New York shoe during Art Basel during my first mural in 2009. A flamingo that is still kind of surviving. She has gotten vandalized a little. I met him and Stash was the one who curated the whole project. He passed my information to Stash and Stash told him to invite me. They needed an artist to represent Miami and they chose me and I was super honored. I was the only female on the project, which was cool, too.

That was the project. All the artists had to do a canvas with your style representing your city. I did the gator. They did not want it to be too feminine, which is a weird request because my work is feminine. Every time I do incorporate animals like reptiles and mammals in my work I try to keep it less cute. I use the grouser animals that people don’t like. I tried to keep it as unfeminine as I could. It was cool. Then they just took the pieces and put them on the shoes. It was a long process.

I hope. If I get contacted for something like that again I would love to do another shoe. It broke my heart that they did not do the female shoes so I really hope to get together with them in the future and do a female shoe.

I do not really have any representation. I show a lot. In San Francisco I show with Spoke Art. In Miami not yet. The idea of being represented right now is like getting tied down. I am not ready. Especially in Miami. I am from here so I like to participate in as many shows as I can. I don’t really want to feel tied down. Maybe if the right gallery came along.

I will be in an exhibition at Known Gallery in Los Angeles. It is going to be a three person show. I still don’t have a date.

One of my favorite books I have ever read is “Invisible Monster” by Chuck Palahniuk. I also love “Fight Club.” I am trying to get into the habit of listening to more audio books while I paint. I like to work with movies on in the background. I could listen to music but at some point I get stressed out when the song changes. I like to have TV or a movie as background. It is usually movies I have watched a million times so I don’t get distracted. I can quote movies.

Like “Pulp Fiction” and lately it has been “Shaun of the Dead” a lot.

It is the artist Alphonse Mucha. He is one of my favorite artists and a big inspiration. He is from the 1890s. Very art nouveau stuff. He was a big inspiration when I started painting, especially the way he paints women and their figures and his color palette. He does a lot of seasonal series. I went to Paris and I went to the Louvre and I bought one of his books and came to my tattoo artist here and he did it. We are adding as we go along.

That’s another thing that sparks inspiration in pieces I have come across like a photograph. If I like the colors, I will try to incorporate that into my piece. Color is important. It changes a lot though. I don’t really have an idea when I start a piece unless something inspires me. The color palette changes as the piece goes by. That’s another struggle with the murals. You have to have more of an idea of the colors cause it is not as easy to change. It is still not super comfortable for me.

I am super grateful that my parents have supported me and continue to so. My dad used to paint and he never pursued it. They let me follow my dreams. They never pushed me to do something I did not want to do so I guess the advice is to do what I love and continue to do it and be happy doing it.

I am involved in a project at the Marine Stadium in Key Biscayne . It is called Friends of the Miami Marine Stadium. They are doing this project to preserve the stadium and fix it and open it up again for business. The city has been wanting to tear it down. They are getting artists to come down, both local and from all over, and we are painting murals there and documenting it and we will release prints and the benefits will go to the stadium. For more info check out www.marinestadium.org

It is very figurative. It is pluralist, in a way. I identify with things that Donald Judd was doing and even though I don’t work minimalist at all, I sample . Perfect. Because I am part of this generation that has the internet and has access to all this information on all these different art periods I can just go research at the click of a button. I am able to sample whatever I want from whatever period of time. I almost think of myself as a DJ sometimes, flipping through albums, sampling and doing these weird match ups. Lately I have been looking at a lot of Francis Bacon because he had the figurative element as well as that gestural, very abstract expressionistic approach.

I’d have to say it’s 50/50 for the most part. Sometimes I can visualize a piece and it comes out almost exactly how I had planned. Not even almost exactly but it comes out close. And sometimes works really go off on another tangent and divert from my original idea. For the most part I would say about 50/50. I specifically have been working with referential material. The references that I am using have poor quality or have been run through several filters, like a screenshot taken from a conspiracy video that had sampled a movie clip. I take that and do a photo collage in Photoshop and then I use that as my reference. If it is just a really old, poor quality photograph or something like that, I like using that as a source of reference, because it allows me a lot of opportunity to implement my own artistic vision.

It is kind of just like a case by case basis. I would like them to come out but I do like a certain amount of surprises to happen in the work. If it comes out less like what I have planned, I am totally fine with that. I almost prefer that. I can see that as I grow as an artist I start to allow more and more of that to happen. More chance to be involved in the process. Right now, there is still a pretty good amount of control exercising over the works I think.

You have been traveling a lot since graduation from New World School of the Arts. How did that affect your work? What did you take away from it?

I went to several different places. First, I went off to Texas with the Chinati Foundation, which is a foundation that was set up by Donald Judd, the minimal sculptor. Marfa, Texas. It is in the middle of the desert. It is three hours from anywhere. Being out there in that landscape was very, very different. A very different environment. It was inspiring in a lot of ways. I am really into these mid-century artists like Donald Judd and the minimal sculptors. Especially the work I am working on now doesn’t really have much in common with them. There is something maybe about what they were interested in. Their fascinations. Reading about them. Reading some of Donald Judd’s writings, I could really relate to some of the things that he says. That was just a brief trip. After that I followed by going to Europe and I went through Italy and did Venice, Florence and Rome with my graduating class. Then, I went off on my own afterwards to Berlin, Amsterdam and Vienna, Austria. I have to say, Italy definitely impacted me the most because I was seeing all the historical paintings, sculptures, architecture. All the work of the masters. It is all within the Western canon of art making. It has always been something that I wanted to see in person and I had the chance to. There were some things that I saw and I thought, oh, that’s not as impressive as it is made out to be, and then there were some things I had never even heard of before, that I was completely floored by.

I gotta say the Sistine Chapel. So much hype around it. The fact that it is a fresco is amazing. He was painting it on his back onto the ceiling, but it is not as impressive. The anatomy is not that tight. A lot of the figures are kind of disproportioned and whatnot. Maybe it has to do with the context in which you are viewing it. It was kind of dark in the room, looking up, and crowded with a lot of people. You kind of have been walking through the entire Vatican already and it is kind of one of the last things you get to. You are crammed in there with a bunch of people like sardines so that doesn’t make it quite as enjoyable, I think. As far as something that I did not know much about that turned out, was the Tintoretto paintings. He has a lot of ceiling pieces in Venice in the Doge’s Palace and whatnot. His paintings are oil paintings so they are done on canvas and then installed on the ceilings so he wasn’t painting them on his back or anything like that, but they are still amazing. I think he was very much ahead of his time and set a precedence for how the work is painted. So much of what he was doing was so gestural. Very implied. I could really take apart the layers of how he was creating these paintings and that’s something I was really, really into viewing as a painter.

I have got too much going on. Right now, I am working on a bunch of projects for a bunch of other people. That’s basically how it goes since graduating school and finishing my student life, for now at least. I have been lucky enough to be working around a lot of art and with other artists, whether that is working for the museums, collections or assisting people. I just came from assisting Typoe. He is one of my best friends and he introduces me to a lot of people. One of the reasons I moved here to Miami.

Where are you from?

I grew up in Melbourne, Florida. 321

I am entertained by the fact that I lived through multiple manifestations of apocalyptic fear. We had Y2K where people thought the world was going to end cause the computers were going to crash. Now we have had 2012 where everyone thought the world was going to end because of the Mayan calendar. I love that we constantly think there is going to be an end to this shit. I don’t want to get into my religious or spiritual believes or anything like that but I think that that is a very, very fascinating aspect of life that we constantly have to search for I don’t know. We keep subscribing to this fear that we are going to stop and this is going to end and that something bad is going to happen. I just don’t think that that is something you should concern yourself with but I love concerning myself with the stories surrounding it. It is bizarre.

With these new paintings I am working towards an exhibition. I will have a show at Butter Gallery. We are shooting for mid-April. We have not set a date yet. It is still in the works. Paco of Butter Gallery has been great to work with. He is giving me the freedom of not having a deadline. Even though, most times I work better with a deadline. As I said before, I pick a lot of imagery that is based on poor quality photographs. It allows opportunity for me explore other things in paint. I don’t have to stick so closely to the referential image. The photos for this series are from the late 80s and early 90s. All the images I am choosing are kind of from that period. The images are from a friend of mine back in Melbourne. He is kind of a local legend where I am from. For various reasons. His name is Mike Webber. I used to see him driving around town all the time and you couldn’t miss him because he drives these old beat up trucks and he piles junk in the back of his trucks, taller than the cab. This stuff, you think it is a hazard when you see him driving around. He spray paints all over it and stuff. It is a real eyesore but I love it. I think it looks great. He has got a whole fleet of them. He is just known as the junkman in my town. One time I was painting a wall with Typoe and he pulls up in his truck and he asks is we want to paint his truck. We did some quick graffiti, like our names or something like that, and then he takes off. I bumped into him again after about a month or so and he hands me these photographs he took of the trucks and they had kind of this old quality and I actually held on to them for a couple of years. I was looking for something to work with in one of my painting classes and I found those photographs so I thought, why don’t I paint those trucks? I thought it was kind of interesting, like this inception thing, where I painted the truck and he took a photograph of it, giving it back to me and

Some of them yes and some of them no. Many of the people, I have no idea who they are, but some of them, every once in a while, I would be going through his photos and I would be able to recognize someone, like my friend’s dad. That’s kind of cool when that happens. It is funny that you bring that up. I have an image of Moby in 1993. He passed through central Florida and played a show. That was probably before he was big or well known.

Is central Florida in the 80s and 90s the theme for the exhibition?

I guess so. What interests me about this specific time period are the people and technology. My generation has been the first generation that has gown up with the internet. We have access to the web everywhere we go. We grew up with a lot of things, a lot of information, that wasn’t immediately available to generations that preceded us. Growing up in a globalized world. I think that something about that is the reason why I am painting these people from this time. There is a historical stamp that is going to be on that time right there.

I do. I think my interest in this period, too, is because a lot of my peers don’t have the same sort of affinity and understanding for that period. I have siblings that are like 10 years older than me so they were influencing me, turning me on to punk when I was really young and exposing me to a lot of things. For various reasons my mom kind of kept things away from us for a while. I don’t think I got a cell phone until I was a senior in high school. We didn’t have cable TV. We were watching reruns from the antenna of Seinfeld or The Cosby Show. We didn’t have any video games. We were not allowed to play video games. I kind of feel more at home at that time. Am I confusing this with a sense of nostalgia that I might have? Cause that’s another thing I feel my generation is so hung up on, is this nostalgia for things before. Look at what Instagram is. It is a super technically advanced way of communicating and sharing but it is completely rooted in throwing a little filter on a photograph that makes it look old or trendy. We have this really deep nostalgia for things we did not really experience first hand. Look at music. Any music. All this really folky sounding independent stuff. I bet it has something to do with that as well. I paint pictures because I don’t know how to talk about it. But that’s what I was thinking about.