Ryan Heshka wants you to “stay weird.”
The Winnipeg-based “lowbrow” artist does his part to embody and uphold weirdness by drawing on vintage pop culture to create oddly familiar but unique art.
“So many people I admired growing up were ‘weird’: comic artists, filmmakers, publishers, and so on,” says the PureHoney artist for October. “Now that I’m in my 50s, my early instincts to follow these people and become my own brand of weird, and stay true to my vision, feels like it was the right choice.
“Maybe it wasn’t even a choice, but fate,” Heshka adds. “I’ve tried my hand at animation, interior design, and illustration, but making my own art is the only thing that I feel I’m truly good at. It’s not an easy path to stay weird, sometimes people don’t want your weird.”
His subjects would surely agree: B-movie femme fatales, hoary sea monsters and robots from outer space — outcasts, strangers and misfits all — rule his canvases. Childhood inspirations like King Kong and characters from the Universal Monsters franchise – Frankenstein’s creature, Count Dracula, the mummy Imhotep – feature in his current projects.
“Stop-motion films like ‘King Kong’ or the works of Ray Harryhausen stopped me in my tracks as a kid,” Heshka says, “but ‘Star Wars’ was the gateway drug.”
Pop culture characters abound in his comic presses and oil paintings. Most recently, though, Heshka printed an offset comic titled “Frog Wife.” It has a twisted, Mad Men vibe and storyline featuring the titular bored housewife with the standard-issue philandering husband. But Heshka’s series doesn’t end in the typical wretchedly dull divorce. Instead it takes a turn for the … toady.
Heshka isn’t leaving his formative influences behind as he evolves. “Old imagery from pop culture has always been a driver in my own art-making and continues to be,” he says. “But, as I began to want to distance myself from simply rehashing old material, I set aside that material and began drawing and observing the outside world. I’d use quirky people, clothing, design, nature everything and anything that caught my eye or ear.”
His style and his toolkit encourage spontaneity and creativity while maintaining legibility, which is key in today’s diverse artistic landscape. He says artists should “combine their own unique interests to create work that only they can make.”
And retro influences persist. For “Frog Wife”, he used a risograph, a mechanical hybrid of screen printer and photocopier popularized in Japan in the 1980s. “It’s the closest thing I could find to a traditional comic book,” Heshka said in an interview with Chet Zar, adding “Sometimes it’s off-register or the ink fades out in a certain area. I selected three colors for the last one – blue, yellow, red — and then you make the colors out of those three for one press.”
Another exception to Heshka’s classic pop culture aesthetic that observers might pick up on: a feminist streak that subverts the Golden Age horror movie and comics portrayal of women as shrinking damsels or goodhearted sidekicks. Mid-century Madonnas run the show in his series and the femme fatales are emphatically “fatale,” more pulp fiction than plucky Lois Lane.
“When I did my first comic, ‘Mean Girls Club,’ it evolved into a very pro-female work,” Heshka says. “Subsequent comics also took on that form of anti-patriarchy without me being very aware of it. The same with my paintings: they have gone from robots carrying off women in my early days to women carrying off robots. Being more conscious of this feminist slant in my work, I embrace it now. I have a young daughter and hope that she’ll be proud of this work someday, when she’s allowed to read it.”
What motivation drives his projects? “I am super excited to be in the pencils stage of my new comic book, to be self-published via risograph printing,” Heshka says “ I don’t want to give too much away, but in my previous comics I covered the genres of juvenile delinquents, horror, and science fiction, and now I am moving into arena of the giant monster. I continue to pick away at my personal paintings. My goal for the upcoming year is to experiment, to play, and to continue to push myself into zones of discomfort.”
Instagram @ryanheshka and ryanheshka.com ~ Kelli Bodle
