When I ask him about his choice to include his friends within his show Drake giggles on the other end of the phone, and explains, “it just makes me laugh because I have funny friends.” He tells me “it didn’t start out being about friendship at all.”
Going to LA for a month, not knowing anyone, Drake felt moved that so many of his friends back in New York were coming over to see his show.
“It means a lot to have people that wanna show up for you, I guess.”
For five of the pieces in
Seeing Someone, Drake has constructed clothes hangers that act as portraits of his friends.
Depicting each person’s head and shoulders on which the clothes are meant to hang. Drake’s idea was to create a hanger that looks like its owner, that could be dressed up so you could try on clothes without messing up your hair. His friends then became the main inspiration for the faces painted onto the structures.
“I made five of these hangers that were based on my friends. I didn’t tell them I was gonna do it, so I also felt a little weird about that.”
Drake has created what he himself calls “monuments” to his friendships, and his anxiety over the moment when his friends would turn up and see their likeness hanging in a gallery is evidence of the intimacy of the show as a whole. In
Seeing Someone, Drake makes himself vulnerable not only as an artist, but on a much more personal level too. Luckily, though, Drake quickly reassures me that when his friends actually did turn up, they were both excited and surprised to see themselves in his work.
At some point in the conversation Drake makes reference to his childhood and how his love of drawing began at an early age. He talks about being a fan of comic books, and of the pictures that he would make with tracing paper. As he sees it, “The first way you learn something is to really copy it.” We talk about how his tastes have evolved as he’s grown older, and I ask him about his current inspirations, things outside of the art world that capture his attention day to day.
“I think I just trained myself without thinking to look for pretty things around me. The other night I was at a bar that I work at. I went to
Party City and bought a fog machine and set it up. It made the lights very beautiful and I remember moments where I would take snapshots of my friend with the laser lights behind her head, and the fog blowing.”
He seems moved by what’s around him, and tells me that he is constantly logging things that he finds beautiful in the everyday, planning to use them in his art at a later date.
I’ve spotted some posts on his Instagram which show clothes that he’s painted on and is either wearing or selling, and I ask him about this, wondering whether it’s a way to integrate his art into everyday life and enable it to be seen by more people. He tells me that although he wouldn’t wear things he’s made himself anymore, in the past designing and painting on clothes was a way of creating that had a sense of immediacy, and he liked that it could be experienced by everyone.
“There’s something so exciting about being able to wear it,” he tells me. “When I started it was a fun thing; it was accessible and I was selling things really cheap. I get hung up on ‘I’m making this painting and who is going to buy this?’ Where is it going to live? It’s gonna live on a rich person’s wall. I wanna make money, but that doesn’t really move me. What I love is making things that people can experience.”
Drake goes on to talk about how sculpture can be experienced, and often accessed, in a way that a painting on a wall can’t. I ask him, in response, if he thinks that when it comes to his own work, he looks to evoke an emotional response in his audience rather than an intellectual one.
“I think it’s both,” he says. “I don’t really enjoy work that requires you to have a lot of knowledge about a certain subject, or work that’s only for some people.”
“I like when someone takes the time to think about things I’ve made intellectually, but I hope that I make things most people can freely experience and not feel like they’re missing something.”
Drake says he finds it hard to look at his own work in an objective way, and that it’s difficult to see it from someone else’s perspective when the work is so closely connected with his own life and experience. He wonders whether some of his art, because it feels so playful and bright, might be lacking a kind of darker edge, but in the end we both agree that his playfulness doesn’t make the work any less meaningful.
We discuss this just before hanging up the phone, and Drake leaves me with a final hope that “as time goes on more depths will be visible. We’ll see.”