Behind the Cover

BEHIND THE COVER

COVER ARTIST INTERVIEW WITH MADISON HOIBY

BY STACEY CHEN

22 West Media welcomes Madison Hoiby as the cover artist for our OUT-ober issue; here is a special interview with Hoiby about her background and process behind the piece.

Q: What is your background with art?

Madison Hoiby: I’m a third-year student majoring in Psychology and minoring in Creative Writing. Though I don’t study art at CSULB, it’s a main hobby of mine and I would love for it to play a role in my life in the future in one way or another.

Q: What was your process with this piece?

MH: I always start off with painting in gouache, then throw what I have into Illustrator and Photoshop to make adjustments. It’s kind of funny to say that I photoshop my artwork, but that’s basically what I do. I find painting physically, opposed to digitally, to be more freeing and creativity-evoking, so I like to start off with that. This piece in particular incorporates a lot of line work. With patterns, I try to find a method that works through trial and error, then eventually find a rhythm and grow from there. To make the maze pattern, I focused on making straight lines with the negative space. I like to focus on negative space because it’s more forgiving; it’s hard to paint the outline of a perfect circle, but it’s pretty easy to draw a square and fill in the corners enough to form a circle. Focusing on negative space lets me tweak things more and not lose my flow.

Q: Why did you make this piece?

MH: I wanted to incorporate a maze-like pattern to represent how confusing and nonlinear the coming-out process can be. I incorporated an array of paths— some longer and shorter, others more obvious and unclear— to display the varying degrees of difficulty one may have coming out. I wanted to display a more positive experience on the front, so I positioned two smiling figures as a focal point. On the back, however, I incorporated figures of various emotions to more explicitly communicate how coming out isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience.

Q: I’d like to know more about your other art, how does this piece connect to the rest of your portfolio?

MH: I like playing around with patterns in all of my artwork, which I think shows in this piece. I usually like working with more curvy lines and polka dots, so the maze-like pattern I aimed to create here is a little more geometric than I’d usually go for.

Q: Who are your biggest art influences?

MH: Although her influence isn’t very prevalent in the cover, I’m a big fan of Yayoi Kusama. I love any artwork that can be described as meticulous, and she’s a prime example of that. It takes a special type of person to tediously create such clean, repetitive patterns, and I find that extremely admirable. I like the idea of someone sitting in front of a canvas for hours doing the same motion; essentially, making a name for themselves by doing something most people wouldn’t. I also really just like looking at polka dots. I also find a lot of inspiration in American traditional tattoos, particularly for faces. Looking at popular flash tattoos helped me draw faces in a sort of formulaic way—I’ll always connect the nose to an eye or eyebrow and work from there.