Leonardo Drew: Traveling & Making | ART21 "Exclusive"

[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.