IN CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST ANUK ROCHA

Artist Anuk Rocha, (b. 1986) is originally from Hagen but currently lives and works in Marseille, South of France. She uses the practice and form of illustration and painting to communicate in subtle and nonlinear ways.

Anuk tell us about yourself, pls and thanks for joining us today.

I started painting only one year ago, but I have been preparing for this moment all my life. I drew obsessively all my childhood, pretty much non stop until life got “serious”. I got my first job at 14, and left my family when I was 18. From that point on life got very difficult and messy, I worked every job on earth until I had a little nervous breakdown at 27. The burnout kind put an end to that era. From that point on I organized my life around the idea of freedom over money, figured out a way to sustain myself without a regular job, and this is how I live til this day. I turned down material comfort for mental and physical freedom, which inevitably lead me to reconnect with myself and pick up interests I had as a child, such as painting and music. First I started a band with my husband called “Drab City” and now I also paint.

Tell us about your greatest inspirations or influences? 

• The cities I live in inspire me, places I visited in the past or grew up in, nature, people and their style. Since I was a kid I have always perceived these great energies coming from objects and places. I have feelings about objects or a certain, specific spot on a street or in a room which almost have a human personality to me. It is like a soul lives in them, which is pretty much what I try to convey in my paintings. 

• My influences are those who have been able to capture the emotions mentioned above. My husband is my biggest influence.

• Klaas Gubbles comes to mind. TAL R, Paula Rego, de Chrico, Brancusi, Matisse, Gauguin, Braque. I consume an unreasonable amount of art it would be hard to name them all, also because everything influences me, the things I see every day, the people that surround me. 

Tell us a bit about your creative process? 

Like I mentioned before, I used to draw a lot. I have memories back to age 4 where I had very intense opinions about which color had to go on a paper and where. I remember I was going through a period everything had to have a touch of yellow. I also was very drawn to building things myself and figuring out how things were made. This is pretty much how I function to this day. I like to walk around and look at things, admire the construction or nature of a place. I often turn around them for a while to figure out how they achieved the look that they have, and what it is that I like so much about them.

I then put a lot of those moments down in a drawing or take photos to draw them later if I don’t have my sketchbook with me. Since I live in the south of France, right on the port by the fishermen and their boats, I have a lot to look at and often source my colour pallets from the objects they use and the houses that surround the little port. I find a lot of details all around town which I wind up turning into a painting. I recently worked on a series of vases based on reliefs of greek vases I found scattered all around town on buildings and walls. Marseille used to be Greek around 2500 years ago and one can still find influences of that era around the city.

Once I take serious interest in a specific drawing, I sketch it out in multiple ways, try different colours and compositions on them before I hit the canvas. I have to figure out the exact look of the painting before I start painting as I don’t trust my taste enough to just go ham on a blank canvas without any preparation. Making an ugly painting really frustrates me so I try to be a little more prepared before I start a big project. 

How has the pandemic affected your creativity and how do you see the world changing? 

It has changed my life and I’m sure most of other people’s lives too. It’s been a weird one, it has enhanced all the mental problems I had before but therefor made me more productive as painting helps me to put things back into perspective. It also keeps me from thinking too much and I lose sense of time when I paint which is also pleasant. I have also lost many people during the pandemic and it sort of lit an urge in me, to really try getting to that place I want to be in life. For example capturing that specific feeling I have about my environment in a painting, god knows how.

Who do you consider to be an icon of our time? 

That’s really hard to say for me since I’m such a melancholic person and we live in very nostalgic times. It is like since the internet has become a real alternate reality, society has stopped functioning and does not produce any culture anymore, at least not in first world countries. Everything is a revival now. I know the past has always been a source of inspiration for the arts and music, but now we have access to so much information about the past that society does not use it any longer as a reference point but reproduces the past too literally. Movies look exactly like they were shot in the 70s, kids these days dress exactly the way I dressed when I was 14. It’s spooky. 

I think the art world still produces interesting angles to life, but it’s nearly impossible to get a global feeling of it since everything has become about individualism. An icon, to me, is a product of a time, a movement, a representative that has it all, someone who carries that global spirit of the young and does it in such manner no one ever has done before. I really can’t think of anyone having achieved that in the last 15 years and I don’t see how it would be possible since the internet tore us all apart into millions of microcosms all believing we are special nurturing our egos into oblivion. We can not change or put anything in motion if we don’t start seeing ourselves as part of a bigger world. There can’t be an icon when everyone is their own icon.

Anything else you would like to share?

Thank you for your amazing work, the beautiful stories and artists you bring to us in such beautiful manner. I sincerely admire people like you who are curious, open and bring people together. 

Web: www.anukrocha.com

IG: www.instagram.com/anuk_rocha

Photos courtesy of artist.