Creativity Kiosk: interview with Dave White

Photographer Marta Ivanova

Hi, first of all, we would like to begin from your intro­duc­tion. Some time ago you began you interest in cre­ativ­ity from anime, skat­ing and tags and stick­ers in the streets. Tell us a bit about how you got where you are today?

It’s not very dif­fi­cult to impress a young per­son. I was attrac­ted to some things, but at the same time I felt apathy towards things that were alike. I felt the need to rebel and to heighten untra­di­tional ways of self expres­sion. With time the prin­ciples wore down, I accep­ted more tra­di­tional ways as pos­sib­il­it­ies, not as cri­terions. After step­ping these steps, I went on a search to find, what do I really like and so I got here, where I’m now – in the field of graphic.

For quite a long time you were inter­ested in street cul­ture, we can find some works of yours in the cit­ies of Vilnius and Kaunas (Lithuania). Your field has spread to graphic in a wide sense and, as we heard in the mean­time, com­ics? What is your opin­ion about street cul­ture these days? Did it change from that, which you had, let’s say, two years ago?

First of all, I don’t think that there are a lot of those works. Essentially my opin­ion did not change: I was and I am for cre­ation in the streets. It’s just that now I see more attrac­tion and mean­ing in a bit dif­fer­ent things than before. The street and the city space, in the wide sense, is a great place to demon­strate and pub­lish, cre­ate new rela­tions and con­tacts. Often it is left uncared for and not a lot of us pay atten­tion to it. But from all of that, some­times, genu­ine pearls are born and because of them the mood gets bet­ter, diges­tion, blood pres­sure sets itself back to nor­mal and life gets bet­ter (or at least more fun).

We know that you’re one of those people, who like to know what’s going on around them and who learned a lot on his own just by brows­ing the inter­net and look­ing what’s going on in the world from a young age. Maybe you can com­ment what influ­ence the inter­net has given you as an indi­vidual and your cre­ation and how could you link that to the fact that you grew up in a small city?

These things can inflame the need to do some­thing but has a neg­at­ive charge in large quant­it­ies. Of course, when I lived in a small city, did not have any other fields of influ­ence apart from friends and school, I took a lot from the vir­tual space. Most things pro­gress quite quickly and their pub­lish­ing using tra­di­tional means takes time and more often simply falls behind. That’s why I coun­ted a lot on new tech­no­lo­gies at that time.

What influ­ence, in your opin­ion, does pir­acy has on the Eastern Europe? And where would we be without it?

On one hand, if there would be no pir­acy, some pro­fes­sions would become harder – design­ers, archi­tects, advert­ise­ment pub­lish­ing etc. On the other hand, skills of tra­di­tional media would get stronger. There would be less spe­cial­ists, but they would be more pro­fes­sional. To me, per­son­ally, pro­grams are con­veni­ent but replace­able tools.

Tell us about your recent works and the interest in comics?

In the mean­time, I am drawn to com­ics and zins. We could call it a nat­ural sequence after street art because it’s one of such tools designed to doc­u­ment the same street art that can be quite short – lived and one – sided. On the other hand, a zin or comic shows the other side of works/​events/​phenomenon, when you con­cen­trate on the human exper­i­ence, as well. Comics con­nect lit­er­ary and visual sides. If there is a cer­tain bound­ary in a film/​video – the amount of inform­a­tion that you can fit in one frame then there really is no such bound­ary, without the format, in com­ics. The viewer spends as much time as he fells is needed, when in video this moment takes just ¹⁄₂₅ of a second.

You work with a lot of dif­fer­ent tech­niques, so witch is the one you like the most?

A pen­cil and a sheet of paper. In lit­eral and meta­phoric sense.

We know that you stud­ied glass tech­no­lo­gies and now you are fin­ish­ing stud­ies in the field of graph­ics. How much influ­ence did the aca­demic envir­on­ment have on your creation?

In the mean­time, more and more, for example, from the per­spect­ive of dis­cip­line and dir­ec­tion. The sur­round­ing people, who work in the same field as I do, give me a lot. Such envir­on­ment gives more genu­ine critic and less asseverations.

When look­ing at your work, firstly, viva­cious, unreal­istic char­ac­ters dis­tin­guish them­selves. How do you think of them, where are those char­ac­ter­ist­ics born from?

Waren Eillis prac­tices such method of writ­ing, dur­ing which he absorbs loads of inform­a­tion of vari­ous themes and waits till this inform­a­tion sets in to a tan­gible thread of a story. It’s even easier for me. I don’t have to search for char­ac­ters and situ­ations from afar, the envir­on­ment itself exudes them.

What sort of influ­ence do other cre­at­ors have on you? Do you have your favorites?

Individuals and com­mu­nic­a­tion have the most influ­ence on me. Visually I’m influ­enced by Barry McGee, Steve Powers, Mike Mignola, Mike Giant, White Ninja but usu­ally by single works of vari­ous authors or even bit from envir­on­ment, notes, old advert­ise­ments, books.

Thank you!

About author:

Gintarė Žitkevičiūtė
Gintare Zitkeviciute is Art Pit’s thinker and doer. In her work practise, she values lean approach, creativity and quick decisions. She doesn't like working with random people and thinks that a team is a heart of successful project. For that reason, she carefully picks people she works with on everyday basis. She is mostly interested in innovatio... Read further >