NEW 490 Interview UA

well good afternoon everybody today i have mitchell bryce here he's a pretty interesting individual i'll just go ahead and ask a couple questions about you that's all right with you um first who exactly is mitchell garage what do you do um i miss i have a lot of interest so i make visual art as well as music i guess which is kind of our video like auditory art i started with spray paint when i was 16 i got into graffiti a little bit did some murals that way my commission and it got into doing some canvas-based pieces a little bit of post-war work i've been making music since i was pretty young i started playing guitar when i was nine and then kind of from there i picked up the drums and then the bass ukulele piano synthesizer wow so i started producing electronic music as well recently like in the last year so that's been kind of where i've been focused music-wise so i'm also a computer science student so i was really interested in math and science growing up and music was kind of a hobby and once i got to college i had never taken any art classes or stuff but i was pretty invested in it and so i kind of started leaning heavily that way as well so would you say wasn't it was it an acquired skill say with more of the visual arts and also the music in it so did it take a long time to learn it or did you really just say hey i'm pretty good at this i want to keep doing it and get better or was it more of a i like this a lot i'm going to keep practicing until i really get it and i'm yeah that was a little closer too i was i'm not really natural at it at all okay um you know i love music and now that evan i've spent so many years with musical instruments in my hand that feels pretty comfortable but it didn't come really quick you know i've been pretty much tone deaf most of my life really like my cousin tyler who i grew up with like a brother he can sing and uh he never let me forget he's just he can carry a tune and i always that's why i got an instrument because i couldn't do it by myself um as far as art goes uh i'm not naturally someone who draws like realistically a lot of people can just draw portraits things like that and that's something i still can't really do at all um but i was interested in graffiti i grew up once a while we would go to detroit to go to tigers games or alliance games and i was seated at graffiti in detroit and i always thought it was just really interesting to look at and then around 16 uh it was when i was like well i'm old enough like why not you know why am i still just observing right and trying to do something and so i started just doing graffiti names of sharpies for whoever would you know ask right and uh just on xerox paper and i did that for a couple months until i got asked to do a mural and then that's when i got into spray paint it took you know i'm still i've got a lot to learn you know i've only had about four years since i started stripping um but just learning how to control can make a way to do what you want to do has been a really for me a pretty slow process um i'm still not very sophisticated with a paintbrush either it's something i just have never really gotten along with right i found some other tools i do like to use i love calligraphy bands for instance markers um a lot of my work is text-based i really like letters i just as forms i don't really necessarily care about what they're saying right i just those are sort of the forms i go back to and i don't know what to draw okay about how much time do you say within a week that you spend actually doing creative things like your artwork or making music um i wish there was more um making music i get to do pretty seldom during the school year because it's just for me producing music is a pretty time consuming thing it's a lot of fun but it's you know two minutes of music is going to take me 10 to 20 hours to produce the way i want it i'm really particular but in a week i spend six hours in studio classes every week and then generally for each of those i spend maybe three to ten hours outside of class for each class in general one of them is a little bit lighter outside of class alternatively about three hours outside the week and then the other uh it varies pretty wildly but i'm just sort of always invested in it so it's tricky to time it out because no matter what i'm doing i tend to be thinking about it at least in the back of my head or if i'm walking class i'm observing things and looking for ideas one of the things about art classes is you're not really given a set of problems that you can just go through and check off right now it's not like in my math class where if i do numbers 15 through 25 my homework's done right and art i have to figure out the problem i have to look for it find it give myself something to think about and then respond to it and so um you're never really done i never fully step away from a piece right so

so okay okay well what is the what exactly is the end result of this do you want to be an artist full-time maybe after school or is this really the passion that you want to follow throughout the rest of your life or how do you plan to go on straight for me to say at 20 i really i don't know what i want to do right i'm not sure if anybody truly does um i would love for and almost certainly i think it's gonna have to be the way that art music play a continued role in my life um i just don't think there's a way for me to be without them right and so i really have interest in scoring for film i really when i write music i like to do it for some sort of film and i think i do much better that way i don't do a lot of lyrics um in my work and so what i'm better at is kind of setting a tone and rolling with that so i think it'd be cool to work for film in some way i think um visual art is something that is really fun to me i understand i'm not you know i really am not the strongest visual artist i have a lot of things that i'm proud that i've made and i've gone through just as a personal experience that i've gotten stuff back from that um you know every field there's just going to be someone miles ahead and that doesn't really bother me visually but also i'm realistic with myself you know um so i think maybe someday if i were to continue to honestly probably will end up constructing at some point my parents are both teachers and i've kind of lending myself that way a little bit uh just seeing how you know how teachers are paid i don't think that's going to be it oh okay but yeah you know computer science and studio art have a pretty interesting sort of way of blending so i don't really know what that's going to look like in a year from now even all right but it's been interesting so far sometimes up sometimes down all right okay so with all of the things you've done so far already kind of how do you market yourself how do you get people to say hey i'm an artist i'm here um this is what i have different things like that so they can really know and see that you're out here doing work yeah early on like at 16 when i decided i wanted to start doing art and i wanted it to pay for itself basically i learned that no one's going to do it for me and i need to take it out there and promote myself in that the worst that can really happen is people say no right and then they already weren't telling my work and so what i started doing in the summers was just loading up my car full of paintings i'd done and all the supplies i needed to make more paintings and i had this uh i had this portfolio just as basically a picture of a photo album because i learned pretty early on just to document everything right everything you do just take a picture at least and it really helped to have that because people are much more willing to respond if i can say here's what i've already done right you know if you come to them completely blank slate they're not so responsive and so i just went door to door basically as a teenager to different galleries coffee shops anywhere that looked like it would have a place for art nasa like will you hang out painting up in here for sale you saw my paintings uh and from there i started painting at festivals and farmers markets and this is pretty much my job in the summer i would drive around to the towns nearby in my own and i would sell my art and do live paintings at these markets and at these festivals and people were pretty excited about that it was one of the ways it was more feasible to make money off it was to do it live in the street because when someone sees the piece get made in front of them they have that interesting story with it they think they connect to it much more than just the static image that is the result of it and so i sold a lot more work when i was actually out demonstrating that way right okay so you definitely spend a lot of time like we said doing this whether it's marketing it or actually out making either the music or your paintings so how does that i guess invest into family and friends what do they think about it do they i have just the best family friends they've been like i don't know it's a cliche so supportive but really um well i'm dead they're really not artistic people mm-hmm uh they like almost laughably so they're like jared where i like to get from uh but they have their own skills that are just wonderful you know but uh they think it's really interesting they they're most of the time our conversation is just like where did you get this from right you know what like mom's always like i don't know how you're my kid but um my friends are it's amazing how invested they get in it always is pretty heartwarming um i feel like a lot of the time at this far where i get so caught up in what i'm doing that that becomes more important than

the people around me which is a pretty big bummer but a lot of my friends it's it's there's this sort of genuine in their voicemail don't tell me about it i mean you know something this is up i want to come see it and it's really it's really special when somebody is willing to take time out of their days to come see something made or when there's really nothing in it for them other than they get to see it right and maybe they're probably for it um but it's just it's really i guess humbling too to have people invest themselves in you a little bit right but to know that i have so much left to do it's pretty interesting i have really cool people around me and that our community here has been it's like um the people i that i'm in class with all the time we influence each other's work and we're just not really directly or a couple times i'll see something like i'm just gonna take that like that's great i'm gonna completely try and copy because what's wrong with that i'm never gonna make it the same anyway right um but a lot of the times i have this friend patrick o'brien who does art that's it's kind of like horror-based like it's really it's made to make you feel something weird in your stomach all right and a lot of art you can see it's bright colored and kind of playful and it's so weird we get these kind of parallels that pop up every project they end up playing off each other and we don't plan it and we're just kind of working in the same room and we take drastically different roads but they end up looking the same