@lordess.foudre
Lords Foudre is a serious artist with a real sense of humour. She often uses text and graphics in an almost meme like way but also in a way that resembles trip 80’s era album covers. She’d make a killer graphic designer for a hip magazine, but read what she says when I ask her about her day job below.
Where do you live and what is your day job?
Welcome to an interview featuring LORDESS FOUDRE, Award-Winning Internet User and Extrovert Impersonator. Look, Lordess Foudre Inc International understands: You were born, and immediately caught in the mouth of the abyss, and you’re going to spend your entire life fighting to get free of the beast. You, like all of us, will lose this battle. But, before the cold jaws of black chaos come closing down to swallow you back into the eternal void, you’re going to do everything you can to wound the behemoth. To leave a memorial scar, to take out some of its teeth, to carve an escape route into its flesh; to make it easier for the next generation that comes alive between oblivion’s jagged walls. So that there will come a day in which some of us can escape and forge a new path forward; walking atop the shadow of death instead of living beneath it. I live in Los Angeles and I create new artworks every single day.
What does your computer desk top look like?
My desktop background is plain black. I have maybe 5 random files on it, but I couldn’t tell you what they are because I never look at them. I always have Photoshop open, with 5-10 projects going at once. I work on them all at the same time. My computer is covered in coffee stains and my screen is dirty. Sometimes the specks of dirt or worse give me texture ideas for whichever art that I’m working on.
What got you interested in graphic design? Did you teach yourself? Go to school?
I think I was always going to be an artist... I began obsessively drawing almost from birth. I think I might be naturally over observant. From a young age, I would dive inward to deconstruct and interpret the world around me, rather than directly engaging with it in an open way. I wasn’t socially maladjusted or isolated or anything, just easily overwhelmed by the world. Art gave me a means to turn introspection into communication, and ameliorate the frustrations that come with being an introverted but creative person. I would say that I’m mostly self taught, and I try to keep it that way. I look at artistic expression as the one arena in which a person can develop and present an uncompromising version of themselves, unencumbered by the often necessary constraints of physical society. There is a version of yourself that is less like us and more like you, and if you’re strong enough to put aside insecurities and the desire for social reward, you could move more freely towards that ideal. You could dive downward into mystery, and ascend on the gifts you find hidden within the darkness of uncertainty.
Your work seems like it would be ideal in poster form - do you ever print them that way?
That’s a neat idea, thank you. I have an online shop that is about ready to open, I think the prints will be 8 x 8 on canvas or framed photo paper. Perhaps people would like posters more! I’m never sure.
What themes have you explored in the past? Where do your interests lie now?
I like to play with the disconnect between the seemingly boundless timelines that the internet is generating, and the very limited linear timeline of our individual human lives. I think a lot about how an individual’s consciousness is a shifting thing, and is as much what the person remembers as it is the things they’ve forgotten, or never knew in the first place. And yet, an individual has a pretty good, or at least a confident, understanding of who they are.
I’ve spent a few years digging, to artistically and humorously capture the sometimes obfuscated roots of traits that often bring ruin and untold complications to a person’s character and relationships, in an attempt to cast these things out of myself and to help others do the same. I’m still doing that, but right now, I’m trying to go as far as I can... To leap from precipices made up of the artworks I’ve already created, to land on ideas further and further away. I want to keep finding obscure, intangible concepts and create little visual monuments to them. If any of this matters, if there is value to any of my art, it will be found inside the hearts of the people who’ve benefited from interacting with it.
If you could collaborate with some fancy brand out there who would that be?
I want everyone to know this: People who are more attractive than I am tell me that I’m pretty, and more than one celebrity has acknowledged the fact that I am an artist. My dreams lie in collaborating with the internet to provide me with the ability to use Instagram incorrectly.
courtesy LORDESS FOUDRE
interview ASHLEY MUNNS
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