[Leonardo Drew: Traveling & Making]
[Vigo Gallery, London]
Okay, what kind of questions do you guys have?
I mean, I don't know too much about...
Stowe School, right?
So you guys are what year? What year is this?
[STUDENT] Lower 6
[DREW] Lower 6? What is that?
[MAN] That's 17, basically.
[DREW] Seven...
[MAN] 17.
[DREW] Oh, okay.
I actually didn't get out...
I didn't realy get outside too often.
Only recently, I've been traveling
and moving, and taking in new information.
So, I think that if you allow your
antennas to sort of, like, reach out,
you'll find... you know, like,
what it is you need for this part of your journey.
You know?
So I've been traveling a lot.
Just recently, I returned from Lima, Peru,
and did the Nazca Lines.
Visiting, like, Cuba,
and Madrid, and Switzerland,
and all those things were done back to back--
one after the other.
It was a realization that I could spend
that much time out of the studio
and not miss the studio,
because life was going on
and art was going on within me.
The art is fed by experiences.
Traveling and digesting things,
and allowing these things to sort of
influence your body.
I know with all certainty
that all aspects of your body is a receiver of information.
The way the light reflects off of things.
The way the wind blows or doesn't blow.
I mean, all these things have an effect on you.
I'm a visual artist,
so it's going to find its way out, you know,
into the world through my medium.
It says here--
to my grandmother from me--
it says, "Towards the end of my stay in Japan..."
Wow, this is from my trip to Japan.
"I'm at the airport waiting to go to Okinawa."
"It's been an interesting three months."
"First week, I was invited to dance with the older women of the village."
"Some of them must have been pushing close to to 110 years old..." [LAUGHS]
"But man, they could dance!" [LAUGHS]
One of the places that I always wanted to visit was Japan.
I have no idea why that was so in my body that I had to know this place.
But, in 1997, I had the opportunity to go.
"This part of Japan is colored with real soul."
"I chopped sugar cane and ate pig feet." [LAUGHS]
"Now that's soul food."
When I was in Japan, I was looking at
how to make color by natural means.
"The colors on the beach were surreal."
"The water was both green and blue."
"The sand: white, white, white."
That was what I went there to physically learn.
But, what I was there actually spiritually learning
was a whole other thing.
And what inevitably ended up in the work,
with certainty, had to do with some of the papermaking
that I was studying there;
ended up in the piece that I was doing at Fabric Workshop.
And, even though I had not come to any conclusions when I was in Japan,
I knew that was a door that I had opened
that had to be explored.
So there's always these constant opportunities to learn.
As a receiver of information,
I want to take in as much as possible.
I want to learn as much as possible.
And I want to give back as much as possible.
If you're open, then you can continue on this journey forever.