by Natalie ‘Lee’ Arneson
CPJ: So, would you like to introduce yourself?
Sako: Yeah! Hello, my name is Sako. This is my second year at Evergreen, and I am a visual artist of several mediums. I would say I do mostly illustration, digital, and a lot of my art practice nowadays takes place in my art sketchbook with the loose markers and pens I’ve gained over the years. I’m also really into printmaking but I haven’t gotten to do that in a while.
CPJ: Walk us through your process of creating the cover art for this issue of the CPJ.
Sako: Yeah, for sure. I think the style of art I did for that is one I haven’t done in a while. It’s kind of a mental collage of things around me. I went off to run around in circles on campus just taking pictures of things–of course when it was raining, so I got very wet. I like that twisting play perspective of objects, and I tried to pick things that seemed iconic to Evergreen, but y’know, it all seemed to stick in the red square area. I think we need more iconic looking architecture, I’m gonna be real, a lot of it’s just boxes and concrete. From the photo references I took, I bent some of the figures and pushed them into odd perspectives to piece together this collage-feel.
CPJ: So, where’re you from?
Sako: I’m from California, in the Bay Area. I went to school in Oakland–at Oakland School for the Arts (OSA), which was an arts high school. When I transferred there I watched Victorious in preparation–it wasn’t like that at all–but that’s what I thought it was going to be. I was in the visual arts track for six years, where instead of giving us a range of electives they tacked on three hours a day, everyday, to do studio projects and mess around with a bunch of different art techniques.
CPJ: Nice! Is there anything that you would say first drew you to art? What made you decide that ‘hey, this is something I would like to pursue’?
Sako: I think–both my parents went to art school, that’s how they met, they had rival comics on the student newspaper…
CPJ: That’s so cute!
Sako: Yeah, my Dad’s always like ‘You’re speed-running my life’ because I did the art school thing, now I’m on the newspaper. So, there was kind of that art-vibe in my household. I wasn’t super heavily into art in any of my elementary school years, but I had a sixth grade art teacher who I really sucked up to and got a huge ‘ah, you should do art’ from. And y’know, you give a kid enough praise, it’s gonna go to their head. So I decided I was going to audition to get into this arts middle school, which I think is a wild thing to have children do. You shouldn’t have them have to go up in front of a jury of people and be like, ‘yeah, crush my spirits!’ Actually, when I was getting into the school they missent me the first email and told me that I hadn’t gotten in, and I just can’t imagine doing that on a wide-scale for children. Like, that crushes people’s spirits.
CPJ: The American school system at its finest.
Sako: Yeah–genuinely. Hate charter schools.
CPJ: Oh my god, I went to a charter school. It wasn’t artsy though, it was very academic–like get your ass to college now.
Sako: Yeah, but they can get away with horrible–the worst teacher stories I’ve ever heard in my life come from people who went to charter schools. The teacher turn-over rate alone…those guys can get away with such bullshit.
CPJ: Hah! Anyways, do you think growing up in the Bay Area, which I know is typically considered to be a very artistic part of not just California, but the United States, do you think that also had an influence on you pursuing art or what kind of art you produce?
Sako: I do think the Bay Area has a really artsy community. I can’t say–it’s been a really long time since I’ve not been immersed in the arts-sphere. I know that because of the school I went to and the quote-unquote art world opportunities that came with that, I was able to get into muraling the last two years of high school cause I had my main art mentor–Marina Perez Wong–she had her own mural company, worked in the mission with an old mural company [named] Precita Eyes. So I was able to get some connection into that sphere.
CPJ: Do you think being in Olympia, and just being in Washington, has shifted the way in which you create your art?
Sako: Yeah, I would say so. I realized how much of my art practice had just been academic, forever. It was a, not a hard switch, but just a switch to not be producing art under an assignment guise. That’s sort of why I picked Evergreen as opposed to an art school. By the end of my senior year at OSA I had figured out that the things I was learning from the studio classes had kind of capped out. Moving to Olympia, I think I was hoping to see a new art scene, or get to know more artsy people, and that has happened in a certain capacity. But moving to a new place and being in a pandemic has made my art feel a lot more insular, which is not how I like to work at all. I prefer collaborative learning–that’s probably the biggest thing I miss from getting to do art in a classroom is getting to work with other people, get the feedback, get to do the whatever-random-ass assignment work together. That’s what I miss from big projects, like mural projects and other community-based art things.
CPJ: So, speaking of things that you’ve done since coming to Evergreen–I know last year you were one of the recipients of the Material Grant for Creators put on by the First Peoples Office and you did a comic for that. Would you like to talk about that a little bit?
Sako: I would love to talk about that! In the springtime I was able to apply and receive an $80 material grant from First Peoples, and the limits of what you could do with those materials was very wide and I wanted some new inking pens, so I decided to use most of my budget towards that and try to think–now given the time, now given the materials–what I wanted to do. When I was younger, and not in the classroom, comics were a big thing I was interested in and so I vaguely decided that I was going to do some sort of sequential art. I think I was really attached to this idea of not having dialogue or classic storytelling, but experimenting with images and sequence–whatever that would look like in the vague idea–and it just so happened that my grandfather passed right in between winter and spring quarter, and I was like ‘I’ve been doing a lot of journal comics, I’ve been doing a lot of diary comics on my own, I might as well see what happens if I try to channel some artistic energy towards comic making. It was a longer and more sporadic process. It was the first time, I think in a year, I had really sat down and put energy towards one final product, and I was really happy with the piece I was able to make. It was a very different gallery show experience than I’d ever had before. That was what really put into perspective how separated or isolated my art and myself had become over the year. In the past when I’ve done shows, it’s always this frantic month-long buildup trying to get everyone across the finish line, and I didn’t feel like I had that same connected art community doing that. But as a result, I was able to dive pretty deeply into myself, into my grief processing, so it was a different art than I was familiar in making.
CPJ: I know a lot of artists–and not just artists, but poets–really say that it’s their emotions that drive them to create their art, such as grief. What would you say that most of your inspirations for your art have been? Has it been more emotional? Is it a kind of people watching–you just draw from the world around you and think, ‘hey, I would create something outta that’?
Sako: I’m not sure. I think my art, as it exists now, is as a job in a way. The main art that I do now is illustration, which is taking other people’s words or ideas and putting them [into art]. I’ve done a lot of album covers and book covers lately, so I feel that my art has become something that I love doing but it’s a bit removed from my person. I also think it’s interesting looking at my sketchbook right now because I flip through it and a lot of it’s ‘I am going to sit here and I am going to draw things around me, things from life that I’m taking inspiration from’, but I also notice I’ve got my class notes on one side and I’ve got my art on the other, and then I have my job stuff and there’s no separation. There isn’t this big like ‘this is my art, I am an artist’ feel, it’s just like ‘everything’s in this bucket and we’re just gonna roll with it.’
CPJ: I love that though! Our wonderful in-house artist for the CPJ.
Sako: Hah!
CPJ: How have you liked being the in-house artist for the CPJ?
Sako: I mean, last year the Cooper Point Journal was the most connected I felt with the campus and really just getting to talk to anybody. I absolutely love illustrating for people. I know I was just talking about it as illustration being something I do removed from myself personally, but I don’t necessarily find that a bad thing because, again, I’m really into this collaborative making and working with more than one mind. It’s been really fun. I’m just a nerd, I really like showing people what I do and seeing them excited about it.
CPJ: What have been some of the most recent projects you’ve worked on?
Sako: As of late, I had a friend in high school who had been in the visual arts track with me and transferred out into a fashion design track, but he was also really into music. During school I had done an album cover for him and he reached out to me last year, since then I’ve done about three covers for him. I just take weird free-lance stuff on the side. I think mostly between the odd jobs and newspaper stuff, the time I have to work on my own things is very limited. I basically do a sketchbook every quarter filled with whatever loose doodles and imagery. It’s kind of the long term thing I do, I think I’m on my fifth-in-a-row streak of completed sketchbooks. Which is a hard thing to do, it’s hard to wrap up a sketchbook.
CPJ: It’s very impressive.
CPJ: Are there any last words you’d like to part with for the interview to sum up what you think about art?
Sako: I think art is–I don’t know–it’s interesting to watch it transform back and forth from something that is a very personal and grounded form of expression, and also just a job, a thing I do, right? And I don’t think that morphing is a bad thing, I think maybe that just speaks to the versatility of what art can do.
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