Around The World: Valentina Ciarallo Interviews Ian Tweedy

“When I paint today I try to emulate that feeling and continue with creating that perfect combination of painter, paint, space, and place.”

Ian Tweedy, Retracing My Steps, 2011. Performance, painting (still frame). Courtesy of Complesso Monumentale Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome and the artist.

Around The World: Valentina Ciarallo Interviews Ian Tweedy

Valentina Ciarallo: Who is Dephect?

Ian Tweedy: Dephect is an alter ego of mine. I have had others but Dephect was most widely used and also known to the public. Dephect was a strategy, a way to penetrate different playing fields at one time, an artist, a guide, an activist, and a vandal.

VC: What or who made you want to become an artist?

IT: Still under the name of Dephect and a few others, I entered into a museum, I saw large artworks by Richter, De Kooning. There was one in particular that struck me, Motherwell’s Reconciliation. I thought, I’m already doing that, but on freight trains and walls. I still remember that day. I ran back to the hotel and busted out a ton of drawings. I drew consistently, even more than I was already making at that point. From there on, I went to as many modern and contemporary museums as possible. I started to appreciate art history and began to teach myself just out of pure curiosity. So I would say I was an artist from the age of fourteen on, but art museums helped me clarify what I had wanted from art, and specifically from painting.

VC: You were born in Germany, on a U.S. military base, how has the military discipline influenced your works?

IT: It’s not so much the base that influenced my work but the constant relocation from one base or country to the other. The bases where flat, boring, old, and decrepit. Not a lot of inspiration can come from that. Although when I was living in Frankfurt for a few years, right before moving to study art in Milano, I really enjoyed the nostalgia of these bases, some of them completely abandoned and cordoned off. I enjoyed exploring them and even squatted my first studio in one, actually in the same building where I worked in, a large apartment building used as a hotel for military and diplomats.

VC: You started as a graffiti artist: what do you feel when you illegally paint on a wall, in the streets, as opposed to when you do it on a canvas, in your studio?

IT: There is a very big difference between painting on a city wall or train and on a canvas. One is very pro-active and mostly relays on adaptation, instinct and the urban skills you learn from going out late every night prowling through the streets for places to paint on. Painting on canvas is a whole other story, it relays on a lot more. Now when I paint or draw, I don’t work anymore so much on canvas, although lately I’m getting back into it, but not stretching them, no need. I want the objectivity of a canvas instead, a sort of skin. Most of the time I work on objects that I can form a relationship with, or emulating objects/cut-out images that I have bonded with. It’s been awhile since I did graffiti, more than five years maybe. I do miss it. It felt great especially to step back in the end, take the photo and leave knowing you accomplished what you came there to do. Leaving the piece to stand on its own as a trace of what I stood for and made. There was a lot of magic involved with graffiti, that feeling you get when you come across an incredible painting on the wall found in the most unlikely and roughest of places. When I paint today I try to emulate that feeling and continue with creating that perfect combination of painter, paint, space, and place.

VC: What would you like to achieve via your artistic research?

IT: That’s a big question. I’m not sure how to approach it. I want to achieve a lot, yes…I want anarchy. I want direction and clarity or at least that’s what I strive for.

VC: How did the Complesso Santo Spirito in Sassia inspire you and how do you relate Retracing my Steps to the ancient Complesso?

IT: Starting off as a graffiti writer in Rome has definitely left its mark, especially its architecture, its use, and sense of space, the anarchic reality of daily life. The Complesso was once a place for pilgrims to stay, a place of healing, physically and spiritually. You can say that Retracing my Steps is an act of healing, even cleaning, not to say that there was any wrong done, but there is always a need to move on, to reconcile with the past.

*** This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media.