Emiliano Monchilov: Artist Interview by Jacob Anderson-Kester

Photos: Art by Emiliano Monchilov

Can you give me some background as to where you grew up, why you chose to go to Evergreen, what you have studied, and where you are in your life now?

I grew up mostly in an isolated mining town in West Papua, Indonesia, where my parents found jobs as teachers at the international school there. My mom is from Guatemala and my dad is from Arizona — they met teaching in Guatemala. They had a lot of experience teaching at international schools all over the world — it was an excellent way for them to travel cheaply, and of course, my birth didn’t stop them — they brought me along for the ride. We spent eight years there, spending summers here in Olympia since my parents lived in Washington before. (I went to preschool in Olympia.) I spent kindergarten through eighth grade there — we lived in Tembagapura and Kuala Kencana, Timika — they were both really, really small mining towns, pretty much developed by the mine, for the mine. The school at one time had around 50 kids total — there were three kids in my class during my last six months there, I was in eighth grade. Starting in sixth grade, every year there were less and less families living there as the situation with the mine and indigenous people became more unstable and violent (https://www.freewestpapua.org/ for more information). We moved back to Olympia permanently when I began high school, and this is where we have been the last seven years.

I graduated from Olympia High School, so going to college at Evergreen was an easy choice — not only financially, it was very close and I could live at home, but because of the great reputation and quality of education. Evergreen is the heart of Olympia. I have been studying mostly visual art, particularly printmaking, which is something I have never really been exposed to before my freshman year at Evergreen. I would have never expected my appreciation and dedication to printmaking to be what [it] is today. Over the last three years, I have been refining ideas surrounding my creative process, which is informed by a variety of cultural, scientific and spiritual disciplines I have been exposed to in my life and during my time at Evergreen. The printmaking studio at Evergreen is the best in the nation — and is one of the few, if not the only, completely nontoxic printmaking studios. (Printmaking is a notoriously toxic medium.) It is a beautiful space that is by far my favorite place on campus. The printmaking faculty are the most knowledgeable and wise faculty I have had the pleasure to work with during my time at Evergreen — their wisdom greatly expands into other areas outside of printmaking, and I would not be the artist I am today without them and this studio. Being a senior now, the only thing I want to do is take advantage of the printmaking studio and amazing faculty, and to produce and experiment as much as possible.

Your paintings are often very texture-oriented, and sometimes feature an array of colors. What draws you to paint this way, and what led you to develop this style?

Some people have called my paintings “cakes” because of how much the texture and color reminds them of frosting. I love paintings that are sculptural and make you want to touch or even lick them. Oil paint is so good for this. Since high school, I really enjoyed the odd satisfaction of blotting paper with paint and creating a long line of trailing dots. It gave me a lot of satisfaction because I wasn’t trying to paint something, in particular, I indulged myself solely in the process of just creating small dots until my brush was dry — usually to clean my brush or remove excess paint. I liked how the dots would change unpredictably as the paint on the brush was depleted, and the small hand motions of making the dots was very much a flow state. I didn’t think much of this at the time, as it was something I did in-between art assignments or to clean my brush. I didn’t paint again for a long time — it wasn’t until I took a painting program at Evergreen my sophomore year that I really started to refine this feeling and process. Evergreen encouraged me to experiment and trust my intuition. This is when art for me became very experiential, meditative and process-based — which was very different to my previous expectations I had for art-making. I had, like many, perceived art as completely aesthetic-centric, where composition and design are prioritized — and this can be true, some of the most effective and interesting art is very deliberate, intentional and planned out. However, for me, I felt as if I was imprisoning myself by becoming too paranoid and hypercritical of the design and compositional aspect of producing art. I didn’t feel as if art could be therapeutic in the deep sense that I do now, because I was always becoming frustrated with myself for not being able to fulfill the Fine Art™ expectations of the classical Western canon.

Can you walk me through the process you go through to produce a painting like that?

Since I took that painting program at Evergreen, I have been almost exclusively using oil paint — which isn’t as expensive as I once thought, I use the super cheap junk from Hobby Lobby where you can always find mad coupons for — it works great. It’s a little more messy if you don’t use the right cleaning liquids (vegetable/nut oil, mineral spirits, etc.), but I find it even easier to work with than acrylics or watercolor at this point. I like working with oil because there’s no rush (takes weeks to dry), the consistency is unique and just oddly satisfying. You can scrape it, blend it, build it up, sculpt it, the textural possibilities are essentially endless. You can thin it out and use it like a gouache or watercolor. The color reproduction/saturation of oil is unmatched — there’s something about the way oil paint naturally cures and finishes that looks noticeably unique.

On a blank canvas, gessoed or not, I start with applying a dark color, like black, with a palette knife. Using the palette knife I channel chaos and unpredictability, scraping the paint as many different ways as possible to create an abstraction that fills most of the canvas. I try to be as experimental and loose as possible in order to create interesting textures and patterns naturally. Once I have a mess in front of me, I might just kind of stare at it and let my brain do some pareidolia — see if I can recognize anything from real life within the abstraction. This part is really reflective and meditative — sometimes I’ll recognize a pattern and that will trigger a deluge of thoughts, sometimes negative. This helps me process a lot of emotions and release tension from my past. I’ll then intuitively choose an area of the abstraction I feel a connection to and just start creating trails of dots, threading them within the background layer.

I liken my painting process a lot to weaving or knitting — very repetitive small hand motions, experiential, focused, and process-based that enables a kind of flow state and therapeutic separation from thoughts. I will repeat making dots, building up certain areas, allowing certain colors to interact, for hours to days until it feels done. I take many breaks — I try not to force anything — the painting grows organically like a plant. I’ll usually know when a piece is done when the canvas is completely covered with paint and I feel tired of working with the colors and patterns I already have in place, or if I feel that adding any more paint would subtract attention away from areas that I find particularly interesting. Everything is always very intuitive. Sometimes I think it’s good to not know when a painting is finished — Davinci said, a painting is never finished, only abandoned. I try to get rid of a “finished” piece before I have the urge to work on it again.

Your featured photography often utilizes prismatic colors and works with light in interesting ways. What is it about this focus that draws you to photograph it?

It was in my sophomore year of high school, during my first experience with psilocybin mushrooms, that I truly realized how beautiful light interacts with transparent and prismatic objects. (How cliche, I know, Pink Floyd album artwork anyone?) I was sitting on the grass in the sun staring into a big plastic bottle of water that was textured in a way that made light shimmer and separate into rainbow colors. After that experience, I spent a lot of my free time in high school shoving my phone camera into glasses and bottles and staring at the sun, posting my photos on Instagram where all my friends could see what a freak I was. It was all for fun. It’s been a long time since I tried to take photos like that — friends who followed me on Instagram seemed to think these photos were interesting, too, so I gathered the courage to contribute to a photography competition in high school with one of these “glass photos”— it didn’t even make the top 100.

I never took these photos for anyone but myself, it was a similar feeling to looking into a microscope or kaleidoscope. Unpredictable, purely experiential, experimental, and process-based — I was filled with a sense of childlike wonder. So that was really discouraging, to think of these photos as some of the most interesting things in my world, but to find out they are not interesting enough to even be considered for the top 100. Nobody should ever feel as if their work isn’t “good enough”— I would rather post to Instagram forever, to an audience of ten people who actually enjoy my art, than apply to another art competition.

What is it like being an artist in Olympia? Where do you see it benefiting you, and where do you find drawbacks?

Olympia is famous for being a hub of creativity and pioneer to the DIY scene. Any and every type of person from around the world has a safe place to create and express themselves in Olympia. There are always new perspectives and creative voices. While the energy has certainly shifted from the heyday of the ’90s, Olympia remains to be a unique and inspiring little corner of the world — and The Evergreen State College will always be a vital part of what makes Olympia special. Besides being an inherently inspiring place, living here I have befriended peers and artists, who go to Evergreen or have graduated from Evergreen. These people, along with Evergreen faculty have inspired me and led me to become the person and artist I am today — I am eternally grateful for that.

I guess a drawback to being an artist in Olympia is how small of a city it is. There aren’t a lot of opportunities or venues to show work. The new Olympia Lamplighters downtown and Desuetude Gallery on Thurston Avenue are both incredible resources and opportunities for the artist community. It is a really exciting thing for Olympia, I hope that they continue to grow and succeed, and more galleries/creative spaces open up. One of the most painful things is being so close to Seattle, a place of countless galleries, an incredible artistic environment and community like I’ve never seen before, but being far away enough that it is hard and impractical to truly take advantage of it. However, I firmly believe that Olympia will become a larger city like Seattle one day, whether we like it or not — it is the capital of Washington state, after all, [and] is becoming more developed every year.

Where do you want to take your art, both in its literal form and also as its impact on your life?

I am on what I anticipate to be a never-ending search for a particular feeling that I am still trying to understand. I know that I feel this feeling when working with my hands with certain artistic mediums, and the more I become familiar with this feeling through working with these mediums, I can start to recognize this feeling more in everyday life. It is essentially a flow state, in which I feel energized, focused, and clear of thoughts or emotions. The more I am able to recognize and be aware of this state, the easier it is for me to engage and stay engaged within this state. Buddhism, particularly Zen, has been the root of my spirituality in life and art. There is a form of Zen called Hitsuzendo, which is essentially Zen calligraphy — extremely inspiring philosophy, [a] beautiful aesthetic that is in itself anti-aesthetic, similar to wabi-sabi — it prioritizes the mind-body experience. If I was to describe this flow state, this feeling, in one word, it would mushin, or “no-mind”— a Zen term to describe an open and clear mind. If not for my time at Evergreen, I wouldn’t have realized any of this.

While I still struggle to find the words to describe this feeling, what I want to do more than anything is share my journey of chasing this therapeutic feeling as much as possible. I have been working so hard to work through my own mental health — there is nothing that has kept me more sane than being mindful, aware, and knowing when I need to utilize these therapeutic practices. If I can help one person cultivate peace and creativity within themselves, that makes it so much better than just helping myself — and that is how community can be made. Social media has been the most critical tool for not only sharing my journey, but establishing myself as an artist and making connections — it is the most effective, accessible platform in existence, and a liberating way to express one’s voice while becoming inspired by countless others.

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You can catch Emiliano online on Instagram @emilianomonchilov