Drawn Together: Unedited Interviews
Dan Matutina
Interviewed by Nicola M. Sebastian
Was it always art for you or did you have other plans in mind?
I used to doodle on the walls of our house when I was small. I continued doodling on notebooks when I was in grade school. In high school, I never thought of taking up Fine Arts in college. I joined art competitions, I was the illustrator of our school paper, The Leytean, and I was very much involved in different art related activities in high school, but I never saw myself having a career in art and design. I loved Science and Technology (I still do), and I thought that’s what I wanted to do in the future. But then a few weeks before the UPCAT Application Submission, I saw in an entertainment magazine the course that Whilce Portacio (a comic book artist) took, it was Fine Arts. I never thought a course like that existed! I looked it up in the course list of UP and found out that they offered it. When I got the news that I passed the UPCAT with Fine Arts as my course, only my Drafting teacher was super excited. I realized that I really wanted to do creative-related stuff when I was in college. I found out that creativity, art, and design were potent tools for communication and change.
The imagination needs to be constantly fed with sights, sounds, and ideas—it needs stimulation. Where do you go when you’re hungry for some inspiration?
I go out of the studio for inspiration. Drink coffee and watch people. The Internet is also a good place to start, the abundance of amazing works you can find online is amazing.
Please walk us through your creative process: what are the thoughts, emotions, bad habits, or odd rituals that go on in the act of making art?
I usually start doodling with pencil and paper. I seldom go straight to the computer even if most of my works are done in front of one. After reading the brief, I usually research on the topic first, go outside the studio, start brainstorming, and sketching on my idea book. Yeah, I always bring an idea book with me. It’s easy to jot down thoughts and draw ideas when you have one. If for some reason I don’t have it with me, I just usually type the ideas on my phone. I do the same preparations for commissioned, commercial, and personal works.
If you had to describe your art to a blind person, what would you say?
My works are like those sweet/sour candies. They look cute, but most have strong messages in them.
You work on a million different subjects and projects, your art covers everything from political slogans to ad campaigns. Would you say that there is an overarching idea, emotion, sentiment, message or even philosophy to your art, something that you try to convey through your artworks, even subliminally?
Most of my personal stuff (especially the recent ones) have an overarching theme are political and social. Design and illustration is a form of communication so I use my works to tell stories. In terms of visual elements, my recent works have simple shapes and lines with complicated color combinations. I’ve always believed that simple shapes can tell complicated stories.
This might seem a bit morbid. If you could write your own epitaph, how would it go? You can choose to be as imaginative, funny, or odd as you like.
Here Lies Dan. Wishes He Had 30 Lives. Kindly Press:
↑, ↑, ↓, ↓, ←, →, ←, →, B, A
What does the future look like for you? Any upcoming projects or new directions that we can look forward to?
I have a few upcoming projects that I’m excited about. They involve a bit of design, but they are more social or web experiment related. I love doing something on the web. I think it’s the main reason why I started a few web projects with friends of mine. I’m also working on this music/travel discovery thing, that promotes Philippine independent music and travel.
There’s also Idea!s, the social design agency that my good friends and I started three years ago. It’s a studio that does communications and design stuff specifically for nonprofit and cause-driven organizations. We have a lot of upcoming projects there: Design to Make a Difference, Oneline, and Pecha Kucha Manila.
On the personal side of things, I’m finishing Shapes & Statuses—a poster project that involves translating the status messages of my Facebook friends into a graphic poster. I plan to make 20 of them, I’ve done seven so far.
