Every month Brave Island runs a Young Creative of the Month fund, where we spotlight a local young creative with an interview on our blog, and support them with funding of £100. This month, its digital and traditional artist Leo. This fund launches at the beginning of every month, you can apply to be Young Creative of the Month for July here.
Please can you tell us about your creative practice?
I am a (mostly) self-taught digital and traditional artist, although I mostly stick to digital as I find it less costly material-wise, I do tend to sketch for fun or when I can’t be bothered to fight with my laptop to get it to work. I started drawing when I was about 4 or 5 years old and haven’t stopped since- I briefly had tutoring between the ages of 9-11 from the incredibly talented Linda Edge, who is another Isle of Wight artist, but stopped when I started high school, however I still carry the techniques she showed me to heart and have built upon them in my own way to create my style.
For as long as I remember, I’ve been obsessed with making my own characters, filling up sketchbooks with “comic strips” and trying to write my own graphic novels, however nothing I made connected with me until I was about 12, where I made some concepts for a family whose storyline would be a satire of British politics and culture, and fell in love. Not looking back, these characters are a lot more than just a satire to me, but practically real people. Every time I draw them, with every stroke of my pen I feel as though I am talking to real people, and in turn the subjects of my paintings help me process real problems I’ve encountered in my life. Drawing is a very therapeutic activity for me, and I don’t think I would be who I am without it.
Where do you draw influence from for the art you create?
I see inspiration in almost everything, but most of my art and characters are drawn from real people in my life, their features, their stories, their mannerisms- surprisingly almost all of this appropriation into my art is subconscious, and I don’t tend to notice it until my friends ask me why someone I’ve drawn has such a close resemblance to someone we know in real life. For example, my main character, Will, changes features and design slightly quite often as my interest shifts from person to person. As well as people I know, I’m also inspired greatly by the 20th century, although this is rarely reflected in anything other than my personal style! For my art, I tend to focus more closely on what people are wearing/saying/doing now- since everything I do is based on a contemporary narrative of Britain, I like to look around and see what the people around me are like- taking Sociology in A-level was very helpful to me as the entire subject is essentially looking at everything happening right now, and it drew my attention to things I hadn’t considered before, like intersectionality, which helped me have more confidence in the stories I wanted to tell.
As well as this, I like to utilise my knowledge as a young carer to draw light on things like social care (and the lack thereof), realistic depictions of mental and physical disability, and the types of relationships and inescapable trauma that comes from being disabled or being related to someone with a profound disability, even if it’s not from the person themselves. I feel as though a lot of things go unsung or ignored in contemporary Britain, and we like to focus on meaningless issues that take up a lot of energy for both the left- and right-wing individual, while letting the most crucial of problems get worse without any semblance of resolution. My art and writing aims to bring light to these basic issues, even if it’s not seen by a large audience, that doesn’t matter to me as the act of making it in itself is more important to me than the amount of people who see it. I also like to listen to music that I think my characters would listen to, often meaning my playlists take on a confusing mix of genres and I end up listening to music that I don’t even necessarily like for the sake of connecting to someone who I’m drawing or writing about.
British TV shows are also important to me, my biggest inspirations being Years and Years, a BBC drama series that is basically my entire plotline but executed better, Top Boy, Skins and Peep Show. I know they aren’t incredibly realistic, but it gives me a good baseline, and my own stories don’t try to be hyper realistic either, I know some things I write about are preposterous, but I still do it because it’s interesting to me. Literature wise, I draw a
lot of influence from books by Jacqueline Wilson, she is probably the closest person I can say to being a celebrity idol for me, as she pretty much shaped my childhood and showed me there was more to literature (especially for children) than happy lives and constant easiness, which really spoke to me when I was younger, helping me to
process and understand certain events in my own life and identify them as something that other people experience, and that I’m not alone. I still end up crying over “The Longest Whale Song”, even though it’s meant to be for children.
What projects are you currently excited about?
Currently, I’m working through several pieces. I tend to leave things half-finished for months and come back to them when I feel ready to tackle them, and this is happening for me right now; a piece of my main character Will and his wife, and one of my PE teacher character, Paisley, and their friends at the festival, which is definitely something I’m struggling with as they’re all subjects I’m unused to drawing. I always like to draw my characters at the festival, regardless of whether I’m going or not, as I always find it such an interesting event to peoplewatch. I don’t think I’ll go this year due to prices, but the times I’ve been have absolutely inspired me to work more on my characters.
Where can people find your work if they’d like to support you?
I don’t really have anywhere my art is displayed, but my Instagram is @leo.sim0 and I share my art on there, I have a dedicated art account @spider_outrageous but I don’t post on there if at all.
