[train chugging]
When I think about collaboration, I think about inspiration
I think that you can look up at other artists or musicians or what have you,
and you get ideas from them
To me, that's a form of collaboration
Their work, their images, their life
can be something that can inspire a work of art
I find collaboration a much looser term
I can find that you can still be working in a very solitary manner
and still be influenced by different forces
For me, I absolutely had an incredible emotional reaction
the first time that I saw your work
I felt a sense of strength and optimism when seeing your work
in a way that I hadn't felt in a very long time
In that format, through Tumblr or Instagram or however,
it somehow becomes, you know, a part of your world
seeing it in that space - Yeah
And I know a lot of my friends have also discovered your work through Tumblr
Do you ever worry that it, in any way,
desensitizes the work or do you completely embrace it?
I love the internet
I think it's the greatest thing of all time
I'm the same way
Especially growing up in Alabama,
you don't really have access to stuff,
so the internet was really my way of connecting to other artists.
If I see or I listen to a record
or I see another artist
like I see a Lucian Freud painting, I'm inspired
and I feel like because his work exists, because he existed
I'm suddenly creating a new sort of work,
and in a way, that is a form of collaboration
When I started this style, the first thing I thought of was,
what does my skin feel like?
We have enough about what my skin looks like,
but what does it feel like to have this skin?
And so, a lot of the layers
and a lot of that skill is like to really press down
and get a feeling of the texture
The marks like scarification
I'm literally embossing the paper with the pen
and really pressing down
'cause I want the mark to stay and I want that presence to stay
It's like the Toni Morrison thing
It's like my blackness can be something universal for people
People just haven't seen it visually
I think they've seen it in literature, they've seen it in music,
but rarely do they see it in fine art,
and that's like what I wanted to push
This is supposed to be a little bit of an interpretation of your work
in terms of the black and white and the graphics
- I'm loving it - Okay, cool, cool, cool
What's interesting is as I'm making this record now,
all of my Brooklyn friends, my girls,
have become my muses for this record
It's like, what I can hear them listening to
at home while they're creating
There's nothing about pop music that scares me
or makes me think that it's less valuable,
and so, for me, this record was really about
creating a pop album that felt good
but still told very intricate stories
and still had the layers to it
Sometimes you're put in these situations where you're working with a producer
that, you know, this record that Dev Hynes produced,
and we have been hanging out
and sort of getting to know each other,
but writing music together is an incredibly vulnerable experience
And so, I think in the essence of collaboration,
just really being able to lay yourself on the line
and not knowing what to expect
has seemingly become the best outcomes for me