Artist Decoded by Yoshino

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Damian: Damian Joseph Kulash Jr. (born October 7, 1975) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and music video director who is best known for being the lead singer and guitarist of the American rock band OK Go. Damien was born in Washington DC and spent a large amount of time studying at the Interlochen Arts Camp. He was active in bands at his time at Brown University, eventually winning a prize in music composition.

From the time span of 2005-2007 while the band released and was touring off of the "Oh No" album, the music video "A Million Ways" ended up being the most downloaded video with over 9 million downloads. The band decided to cut ties with their major record label deals with EMI and Capitol Records, and eventually started their own label, Paracadute, in 2010. OK Go released their most recent album completely free on their website, which includes rarities, B-sides, and covers of other songs.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Damian discusses how both he and his family contracted coronavirus and how in hindsight, the time spent quarantined yielded different effects and revelations that Damian was not expecting.
• Damian speaks on how he personally finds hope within the world and how it comes to him emotionally rather than a linearly or algorithmically.
• "When the world breaks down or the rules shift in such a drastic way, it's a little like the shackles come off and everything begins to reconfigure. That is terrifying but it also brings an element of hope…"
• Deconstruction and equalization of power structures within the world and hope shining through the cracks of society shifting.
• The depth of what we experience and how it relates to the "Truth".
• Life being a puzzle with the pieces everchanging, how it relates to our humanity, and how we see others and ourselves change.
• Giving yourself the freedom to tread new waters, and to genuinely feel emotions.
• Dynamic of how we are all working together for a common goal.
• Collaboration and calling back to others who have to tread the path before us. "We are not individual actors"

www.artistdecoded.com

Damian's Letter For "All Together Now"

Rebecca Solnit - "'The Impossible Has Already Happened': What Coronavirus Can Teach Us About Hope"

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Blake: Blake Mills is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, composer, producer, and owner of "Record Collection" and a Grammy Award-winning artist based in California. Mills has performed on over two hundred recordings, released four solo records, and worked with artists such as Lana Del Rey, Fiona Apple, and Bob Dylan.

Playing as both a session guitarist and composing his own material, Mills meticulously masters both the abstract and intentionality of multiple instruments and seeks to explore the sounds they each have to offer. After working with artists such as Fiona Apple, and Andrew Bird, Mills revisited the studio and developed the sounds and resonant textures that became "Mutable Set" - a collection of eleven songs that focus on the dissonance of modern life.

Show Notes:

• 0:00:00​ - Introduction
• 0:04:38​ - Origin of the Name of New Record "Mutable Set"
• 0:07:19​ - The Bigger Picture of the Album
• 0:11:41​ - The Self Above Any Specific Role in Music
• 0:17:44​ - Working On Own Projects VS For A Client
• 0:22:09​ - Collaborating and Experimenting with Perfume Genius on "Set My Heart On Fire Immediately"
• 0:26:28​ - Creating Unique Tones and Characteristics Lead to Artistic Fulfillment
• 0:31:16​ - Using The Environment and Studio as a Unique Characteristic of the Process
• 0:37:27​ - Sound City Studio, The Hybrid of Professional and Home Studio
• 0:40:40​ - Partnership With Tony Berg Through The Years
• 0:44:12​ - Mystery Job of Record Production
• 0:46:48​ - Constant Desire to Write New Songs
• 0:49:32​ - How "Mutable Set" Began and the Many Collaborations
• 0:56:23​ - In Love With A Sound That Can't Be Recreated
• 1:04:43​ - Future Plans
• 1:06:53​ - Wrap Up

www.artistdecoded.com

Blake Mills Instagram

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Christine: Christine Yuan is an Emmy-award winning director whose television documentaries have won Best Culture & History Documentary at the 2018 LA Area Emmy, Best Documentary at the 2018 Golden Mic Awards, and Best Feature Documentary at the 2017 National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards. Her narrative work has screened at the Cannes Film Festival Court Metrage, Marfa Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, The Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, San Francisco International Festival of Short Films, and more. Her commercial work has been shortlisted for D&AD's Next Director Award, 1.4 Awards Show, Young Guns 15 Awards, and Shoot's Director's Showcase. Her short films and music videos have been featured on Nowness, i-D, Dazed, Fader, booooooom, Vice, and more.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Discipline being instilled through the act of running and physical activities
• Haruki Murakami's book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"
• Painting as an introduction to Yuan's interest in creating
• Lessons she learned from her grandmother about the joy of living a simple life
• Staying grounded and present
• Her short film, "DIYU"
• Kundalini Yoga
• Her background growing up in Christian schools
• Talent and discipline
• The idea of "Imposter Syndrome"
• Creating substance in one's own being
• Growing up as an only child
• Accepting and finding catharsis in loneliness
• The differences between directing a commercial, music video, and/or a short film
• Gender inequality that exists in the film industry

www.artistdecoded.com

christineyuan.com

instagram.com/christineyuan

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Bao: Bao Nguyen is an award-winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Saigon. As the child of Vietnamese war refugees, he first pursued law to appease his parents but soon found his passion in film. His directorial debut, Live from New York!, opened the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. He is an alumnus of Berlinale Talents and the Firelight Media Documentary Lab. He earned his BA at New York University and his MFA at the School of Visual Arts.

About "Be Water" In 1971, before his superstardom, Bruce Lee returned to Hong Kong to get the opportunities to be a lead actor that eluded him in America. In the two years before his untimely death, Lee completed four films, which changed the history of film and made him a household name. Through rare archival footage, memories of family and friends, and his own words, the story of that time and Lee's prior experiences are told with an intimacy and immediacy that have infrequently been used in earlier tellings of his legend. Growing up and living between the West and the East, Lee was ahead of his time in thinking about the transnational audience. He experienced the racist reaction of an American film industry inundated by a subservient and menacing image of Asian people—and learned he'd have to tell his own stories to escape it. Director Bao Nguyen elegantly weaves Lee's personal struggle for visibility with that of his times and reminds us that though it was for a short time, Lee's star burned so brightly we still see it today. Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Nguyen's views on the coronavirus and the recent protests in the US
• Racial equality
• Nguyen's experiences as a child, having parents who were war refugees from Vietnam, his experiences drawing out of curiosity for storytelling, and how it eventually developed into a multi-dimensional, intentional, and intimate form of filmmaking
• Bruce Lee's impact on American and Asian American culture, which captured Bao's attention in a unique way
• Within his early films, Bruce "was fighting for his voice to be heard."
• As Bao matured and entered college, his views on social justice and the stories that could be told through these particular individuals began to flourish.
• The more intimate, immature version of Bruce's life stood out within Bao's research. Within this point of time, Lee was taught how to have a strong sense of identity as an Asian American.
• Bao and Yoshino speak on the idea of having no regrets and letting go with particular things in life, and how being grateful and present-minded is vital.
• Yoshino and Bao talk about the role of a teacher and the dynamic they have with their students. A great teacher differs from a normal teacher in their ability to allow students to explore themselves honestly.
• Bruce's desired to have his cultural viewpoints expressed in American culture
• Creating an atmosphere of connectivity

www.artistdecoded.com

Vimeo - Bao Nguyen

Sundance - "Be Water"

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Ludovic: On October 16, 1994, Ludovic Nkoth (LNkoth) was born in Cameroon, West Africa. Growing up in African, Ludovic learned to express himself creatively at a very young age. Through his vibrant use of color and ability to capture life through a distinct lens, Ludovic's past time was consumed with rough sketches of the beautiful cities of Cameroon.

Ludovic's work is heavily informed by the events in his life which led him to move, as a young boy of 13 years old, from his native Cameroon to the United States. Leaving his birth-mother and family, the young man found solace and comfort in the creative process while being raised primarily as a stranger in a strange land. It wasn't until he migrated to the united states that he began to reconsider his own culture as a catalyst to locate his identity. For Ludovic, who learned to speak English as a teenager in a world completely alien to him, still – at times – finds himself displaced in his adopted country. In the states, he is viewed as an African, but in Africa, he is viewed American – leaving the passionate young artist in a sort of ambiguous and cyclical displacement of identity. Given the contentious issues of identity, patriotism, Confederate ideologies and racial bias growing in the States at the time of this writing, the paintings and his perspective seem of increasing relevance. As such, the work presents a complex but highly personal investigation of a very personalized view of Africa; his family history; and the cultures, traditions, and ideas of Africa and its diaspora pre-and post-colonialism. They are approached with a type of naive brusqueness, an immediacy and boldness of colour that suggests both a passion and sense of discovery. African symbols such as masks, patterns, and other symbols of identity and culture remain consistent throughout. He states that through creation, the works attempt to "regain the things that were taking away from [his] people. Things such as power, culture, the idea of self and the idea of being black and proud."

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Film by Werner Herzog "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"
• The origins of creativity
• Growing up in Cameroon and moving to the US at the age of 13
• Meeting artist Kerry James Marshall
• Identity
• The civil war in his native country of Cameroon
• Loving one's self
• Understanding traditional "voodoo" practices in Africa versus the demonization of "voodoo" by European settlers
• Comparing the historical colonization patterns of the United States and Africa
• The importance of preserving Cameroonian tradition
• Clarity through the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine
• Political structures in Cameroon

www.artistdecoded.com

www.lnkoth.com

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Janna: Canadian painter Janna Watson uses abstraction as both an escape from and return to the real. As the world we know dematerializes into paint strokes, so too does her paint take stage as its very own character in a multi-act drama of composition. Bundles of colour, made up of discrete yet inseparable instances of pigment—what Watson refers to as "moments"—are teeming and poised as though caught mid-multiplication. Sweeps of paint re-direct sharply and fold over themselves; thin, rigid ink lines cut into the pictorial field as rudimentary elements in an increasingly complex system of painterly language. All the components play out on a surface of slow, chromatic gradation. Like many of Watson's players, these backdrops tenderly gesture toward the familiar, stopping just short of representation. The result is a conceptual project (and distinct, stylistic signature) that speaks to a contemporary milieu in which abstract painting is not the retreat of meaning into an unrecognizable realm, but rather the emergence of medium as a "figure" in its own self-inscribed world of feeling and being. Watson does more than reveal paint's potential to emote—she gives it a space to reveal itself, in its own time.

Janna Watson holds an honours degree in Drawing and Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and since graduating has exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally in over thirty solo exhibitions. Her work has appeared in notable public collections including those of TD Bank, CIBC, Telus, the Ritz-Carlton, ONi ONE, the Soho Metropolitan Hotel, and Saks Fifth Avenue. In 2013, she was commissioned to create an impressive, 11-foot painting for the lobby of AURA, Canada's tallest residential building. Watson's paintings circulate regularly at international fairs, including Art Toronto, CONTEXT Art Miami, and in Seattle, where they were recently featured by Artsy in its list of "10 Works to Collect at the Seattle Art Fair." Watson's work has been covered by publications such as The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, NOW Magazine, and House & Home. Janna Watson also runs Studio Watson, a business dedicated to redefining interiors with hand-tufted floor pieces inspired by the artist's abstract compositions. She lives and works in Toronto.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Janna's experience as a youth growing up in a small town in northern Ontario with her father being a Pentecostal pastor.
• "Living in somewhat of a bubble… "naive atmosphere" as a child." She was an introvert and spent her growing life in the church, which Janna says added to the naïve atmosphere.
• Janna reflects about her experiences coming out at the age of 18, her process of beginning to question the very faith she grew up believing, and how the world might be moving around her.
• Janna explains how she came to a particular point of surrender in the wrestling of her faith and personal life. – Critical point within her story; being a major catalyst for who she is today.
• Janna realized later on in her life how much she needed to "touch into" the spiritual world and tap into surrender.
• The process of covering all of her paintings with resin during a rough period in her life. "Shiny and sexy – glossing over the flaws."
• Janna explains speaking in tongues and how she personally uses it within her prayer life and her thoughts on how speaking in this manner somehow transports her to her subconscious state of mind to be able to translate those feelings in her artwork.
• Janna's grandfather pushing her to draw the "essence of things" in her drawings and how they needed to be wilder. He taught her the art of abstraction.
• Janna reflects on the title of her show speaking to the way we are currently living our lives as the coronavirus is occurring.

www.artistdecoded.com

www.jannawatson.com

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About David: David Cheifetz is an internationally acclaimed and collected artist who continues to push the limits of contemporary realist oil painting. David and his family live in Olympia, WA.

"Reflecting the language of dreams, these dark, hyperrealistic tableaux suggest bizarre and intriguing narratives. Cheifetz paints alla prima, an oil painting technique in which wet paint is applied to previous layers of wet paint. He works without detailed underpainting or studies, creating atmosphere through prominent, expressive brushstrokes and strong chiaroscuro." -Artsy.net

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• David's time in quarantine, and reflecting during this time
• David's workshop cancelation in Italy due to COVID-19
• Feeling out-of-the-game, but only in perception
• His family life, and time with his children
• Painting and the inspiration that goes behind it.
• Allowing himself to find meaning in a painting after it is finished
• The dynamic of Cheifetz's painting vs. writing practice
• Experiences of having children and David's reflection on approaching his own personal life with an element of forgiveness.

www.artistdecoded.com

www.davidcheifetz.com

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Erin: Erin Nicole Henry is a contemporary artist based in Atlanta, Georgia, where she began working in the arts at an early age. After leaving art school, her cutting edge paintings made a loud arrival into the art world since they began regularly showing in multiple galleries around the city. Erin examines her environment through surrealist portraits of the human figure. Her work is intentional, with confident brushstrokes, rich layers of color, and details that pull you in. Her unique style and curious subject matter have captured the attention of art lovers and collectors across the globe. Working from her studio in Atlanta, Erin has chosen to use her growing platform as an artist and a working model to spark conversation and bring awareness to issues surrounding LGBTQ equality, sexual harassment, and abuse.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Differences in her work as a painter in contrast to her work as a mode
• Her love for horror films
• The superficiality that exists in the fashion world
• Consumerism
• Healthy understandings of body image
• Being nomadic
• Finding purpose
• Museums: The Broad
• Artists: Matthew Barney, Jenny Saville
• Films: Midsommar (Ari Aster
• Authors: Nancy Farmer, Lidia Yuknavitch, and David Foster Wallace

www.artistdecoded.com

www.erin-henry.com

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Aja: "As a psychic and medium, I find meditation to be a mandatory part of my private practice. Meditation is a foundational piece of my ability to connect to the other side, and to refresh my energy. This meditation is part of an ongoing project that my partner and I are working on entitled, "Tides". Each meditation is channeled through my automatic writing practice, allowing the spirits I work with to directly connect each listener with themes and imagery they believe can activate change, healing, and release. The listener is encouraged to allow themselves to be guided through this third eye journey without expectation to experience whatever comes through. Whether or not you receive messages or guidance from your spiritual teams or your subconscious - it all matters. Do your best to surrender to whatever your mind wishes to share with you. Enjoy the meditation." - Aja Daashuur

www.artistdecoded.com www.thespiritguidecoach.com

https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded

About Young Pueblo: The inward movement can be summarized as follows: we observe ourselves, we accept what we find without judgment, we let it go, and the actual release causes our transformation. We are already always changing, but when we focus on healing we can change in the direction of our choosing; these are moments when we intentionally reclaim our power. Every moment we take to know ourselves, we return as someone new.- Yung Pueblo Diego Perez is a meditator, writer, and speaker who is widely known on Instagram and various social media networks through his pen name Yung Pueblo. Online he reaches hundreds of thousands of people every month through his written works that focus on the reality of self-healing, the movement from self-love to unconditional love, and the wisdom that comes when we truly work on knowing ourselves. His first book, Inward, was self-published and quickly became a bestseller on Amazon. A revised and expanded edition of Inward has recently been published and is now available in bookstores around the world. The name Yung Pueblo means young people; it serves to remind him of his Ecuadorian roots, his experiences in activism, and that the collective of humanity is in the midst of important growth. Diego's practice of Vipassana meditation, as taught by S.N. Goenka, has given him a deeper understanding of liberation that inspires his writing. Through writing and speaking he aims to support the healing of the individual, knowing that when people release their personal burdens it helps humanity build a global peace. Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• A discussion on Yung Pueblo's recent book, "Inward"
• How creativity has emerged from letting go in his meditation journey, and exploring healing through writing
• Attending meditation retreats and his practice of Vipassana
• The importance of practicing meditation even for individuals who haven't had major life traumas
• Selfless and unconditional love
• Self-love A reflection on Yung Pueblo's addiction to pleasure and his awareness of how much it dictated his life
• The idea of embracing change, and being present in the moment
• Overcoming an aversion to introspective reflection of himself, and becoming ok with being alone
• Finding balance amongst his writing practice, administrative work, and meditation
• Books: Bhagavad Gita

www.artistdecoded.com

yungpueblo.com

instagram.com/yung_pueblo