Balint Zsako

Age 30

Email: balintzsako@yahoo.com

Website: www.balintzsako.com

1. What type of medium do you work with and explain how you use it? (Paint, design, photography, collage)

These works are made with watercolors and inks on paper. I like the contrast between the fluid organic quality of watercolor washes and the sharp ink lines. This is a very practical way of working, its fast and I can put washes of different colors on top of one another to create very rich tones. The ink is applied with a quill (dip) pen. I like this because of its opacity, it can go on top of the watercolor and maintain its vibrancy.

I usually start with a stack of uniform 16×12 inch watercolor paper and draw a variety of figures on each. Then I go back and decide which ones i want to work on and go from there.

2. Tell us about your creative process, do you have any rituals, routines you follow? How does your artwork come together? (Do you use found objects, image banks, etc)

My working process is similar to writing fiction. I don’t know exactly where its going to go when I start, I just react to what’s on the page and what ideas I get while working. They are never illustrations of specific conceptual, political or theoretical ideas, they are a result of a cumulative storytelling process.

3. How did you get started with your artistic career?

Both my parents are artists. My brother and I have been drawings from a very early age. I loved physics and math all the way through high school, and even considered industrial design or mechanical engineering as a career but I ended up studying new media art and graduating with a BFA in photography. I have worked as an artist since then.

4. What would you say is one of your greatest accomplishments?

Nothing could make me happier than working on art all day.

5. Where does your inspiration come from? Or is there any particular movement, artwork or artist you find yourself influenced by?

Everything I look at and hear comes out one way or another in my drawings. I absorb things around me like everyone else, have specific ideas about politics and social issues, and am attracted and repulsed by various things in our world, and all of this comes out in my work, but in a mostly non-didactic or non-illustrative way. I want my works to be open to interpretation.

Sometimes people take a work I have made and tell me that it has captured a very specific event or feeling in their own lives. I am always happy to hear what people say my stories are about because sometimes they are better than the ones I think of.

6. How do you see your artwork evolving from now?

Its always changing, they started out with simpler narratives, got very complex at one point and now they are getting distilled again. I think the relationships of the figures in my works are getting more nuanced and I am using less fantastical symbols. But every drawing I make changes the one that will follow it, so you never know what’s coming up in the future. - IC