A conversation with Joana Avillez

I’ve thought about this a lot since you first asked. Wait, ask me again.

Yes. You have to.

Well, yeah, because it’s my job, but also—God, am I going to have to sound really profound now? Who am I? I guess it depends on what part of you is sad. If you’re dry-heaving crying, then it’s hard. But if it’s that bubbling-under-the-surface, latent-but-accessible sadness, then yes, you can draw. You have to. Deadlines will make you forget you’re sad, anyway!

I feel very in touch with who I was when I was nine. What I do now is basically what I loved doing as a kid, but through some process of elimination, I managed to make it my everyday life. That’s what’s great about illustration. I think for artists there’s a different kind of pressure—at least from my point of view—that it has to be brilliant. But when you have very humble materials and when you’re working on a really small scale and you basically have no overhead and you need no space, the bar is pretty low. So I think the path to get there is really easy. There’s no huge buy-in like needing this rare thing, or needing a huge studio, or needing incredible light. I can work with anything. The real challenge is getting to that place in my mind or in my head where I am able to be really present. I need to be alone. I once joined a studio of illustrators, but I could almost hear all their thoughts—I found it very distracting. Plus I spent too much time chatting. I really need to be alone—alone with myself.
I have certain things that I say to myself if I don’t feel like I’m getting to that point. If I’m making something, I want it to be something I’d like if I saw it out in the world. I always remind myself: It should be fun to make. That sounds obvious, but it’s hard to get—You have to find your way back to that point of wanting to do it.

Totally. I’ve had this very crumpled Post-it stuck to my computer since forever that just says, ‘Keep it simple’.

Yes.

There’s this Stravinsky quote—I’ve also got it on a Post-it—something about the more confinements you impose, the more you free yourself. You have to get down to where you’re in a corner with so many limitations that these are your only options and then you can do the most, with just a pen and paper. It’s already pretty reduced, I think.

Yes.

Yes. I’m not a cut-out shape person, but then even in that, there’s a line.

Actually people keep asking me… We were in LA because we went to this wedding and someone was like, ‘Oh, but like when do you do your own work?’ I felt almost embarrassed. I was like, ‘But it is my work’. I definitely draw when it’s not for work. I do a lot of drawing to amuse Nino, which is definitely how I started drawing because my dad was an incredible draftsman, an amazing drawer, and we would draw all through dinner all the time. I don’t mean to be like, ‘Much better than me!!!’, that’s easy, but he really was an incredible drawer. But I think of drawing as really tied to writing, especially the projects I’m working on that are my own. The next one I’m working on now is about drawing and writing instruments and I want the stories to be told from the perspective of the tool, or a story about a certain pen being told in that pen. For example, I want to go to a pen convention.

Oh, yes. Many. Serious pen collectors, like fountain pen enthusiasts. I think it’s obviously interesting because—

Pens are great, and we all use our phones and, Inshallah, Nino will know how to write by hand. I feel like I draw all the time. I feel like everything is drawing… Did I answer the question?

Often I draw funny people that I see on the street—I like to draw people that I notice the most. And I always have a little book with me, but even if it’s for a client, it’s all completely me doing it. So it has to be totally me. I like to make small books—accordion books, weird and funny-shaped books—for Nino when I’m not doing illustration stuff. He was very into bats for a while so I made him a bat-shaped book: It has a bat head I made out of clay which I also painted, and the covers are the wings. The accordion book is about trams in Lisbon, and it’s one continuous, very long illustration. The reverse is tram tracks, which he used with his toys.

It’s that distinction between illustration versus being an artist—It can’t only be for you if it’s going to be for someone else’s story. There’s a Helmut Newton book called A Gun for Hire and I love that because it’s like, you gotta just go do the job. I like the practicality of that. But I think the drawings I do for myself are usually with writing and they’re more like stories.

Oh my God, there’s nothing to say. He doesn’t make a single drawing. That’s unfair—He can write his name, which is so cool. But he’s not that into drawing, and I almost think it’s because he sees me doing it all the time, perched in my little perch, and I think he associates it with me not being available to him. I don’t know. A friend of mine was like, ‘Oh, my son didn’t draw anything until he was four. Then he turned four and then he started drawing’. I hope that he’ll be into drawing. He does like to tell me what to draw. It’s very Spider-Man related. Wait, let me show you. As you can see he wanted web wings and he wanted things shooting out of the sun.

Yeah. He’s telling me what to do. But he’s not that into it, but that’s fine too. I was really into it with my dad. I was thinking that must’ve been really fun for him.

He did illustration. He went to art school in Lisbon, where he is from, but then his life took a turn when he was drafted into the army. In the ’60s, he was drafted, became a lieutenant, and served in the colonial wars in Guinea-Bissau. It was really fucking bad, I mean, it changed his life. Now, when I think about it, he was only 24 or 25. I wouldn’t say it ruined his life, but he never fully recovered from it. I remember asking him when I was little, ‘How often do you think about that?’ Without missing a beat, he would say, ‘All the time’.
After he got out, he wanted to finish art school, but Lisbon was different then—not the trendy digital-nomad-avocado-toast-hub it is today. It had been under fascism, under Salazar, and I think he just didn’t want to be in Portugal anymore. So, he either planned to go to London and finish art school there or New York. He got into Cooper Union and he came to New York and lived in a loft with a bunch of other Portuguese guys. Portugal is so small that any artist you meet will know that crew of guys who came from Lisbon to New York. One of his best friends, Olga—who’s also Portuguese—told me she came to New York with just my dad’s phone number on a piece of paper. They became best friends. Anyway, he was here, doing illustration for the New York Times and various books. I find illustration fulfilling and freeing, but for him, I think, it was more of a means to an end. He had other ideas.

No.

No.

I love that! I also have a memory of my dad drawing this chiquita banana, like a Carmen Miranda type banana. He did this book about politics in South America called The Abject, America, and it was on the cover, and I would ask him to draw that over and over again. That’s my origin story.

I just thought of 10 things. I guess it depends what it’s for. I think I’ve figured out how to avoid drawing my least favourite things. No one’s going to really hire me to draw planes. Machinery, planes, cars—those are my least favorite things to draw. I’m just not very good at it. I think it all depends on what the tone of something is. I would do something for that subject matter if it was on the more human side of it—I don’t even know how to drive.

I also hate to draw really dumb fashion things. Oh, sometimes maps are annoying.

A map to not a real place is better than a real map.

Oh, yeah. I had to really think about it. That kind of map is more than just a street level map. I also did a map for the Joseph Mitchell book I’ve been working on. I did a compass in that. I’ve drawn a lot of compasses recently. Compasses are very cool.

Me too! In the LRB?

I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect’. ‘I’m like so into compasses’.

Totally. And just that all the directions are completely made up. Except for the mercurial underlayer of the earth, which… Speaking of, how does anyone figure anything out?

Oh no, more! I remember when you emailed me. I went to Portugal by myself with Nino because Sean, my husband, was taking the bar, and I wanted him to only take it once. I wanted him to pass. So I was like, ‘I’m going to go away for two weeks, and you’re going to be alone’. I think that was the summer before this one.

Oh, yes, he was. That was a really traumatic European trip. We were staying in a friend’s empty old apartment in Rome, which was great. But Nino was sick, so that trip was basically me stuck in that apartment with no Wi-Fi. It was so hot.

I’m so impressed with you. I was saying this to Sean, or my mom, or someone—how I feel like you can imagine what I could do in your head. If I show you a shitty little drawing, I don’t literally mean this shitty drawing, but that I’ll do something in that direction. I feel like you can imagine what that something will be like. It’s like being in this shared secret brain. Like being in the cloud. It’s really rare and really amazing.

Oh, I know. I was like, ‘What about the proof?’ And you said, ‘What proof?’

Yes, I remember going when I was—actually, maybe I’ll send you a photo of this drawing. It’s the best drawing I’ve ever done. I think I was seven or eight. My mom had a show in Rome at this little gallery, and I did this drawing of the opening with all the people there. It’s the best drawing I’ll ever do.
I remember going to Rome then, but I went back later when I was 18 or 19 for RISD, the art school I attended. They have a palazzo there—Palazzo Cenci—which is the sickest thing ever. If you Google Beatrice Cenci, you’ll find a painting of her turning her head, wearing a turban. That was her house—her whole palazzo. She totally haunted it; people used to see her in the mirrors. She was beheaded after killing her father, who had raped her repeatedly. Icon! Anyway, I went with my best friend for their summer programme, where we just lived in Trastevere, had studios, and then went on a huge trip all over Italy. It was so fun. I remember going from there to Lisbon afterward to see my family. The last time I’d been there, I was 17 with long hair, and then, after my summer in Rome, I had cut off all my hair and gained ten pounds eating pasta and drinking wine. My uncle was like, ‘What happened to you?’ That’s a terrible anecdote. It was a really magical summer in Rome. It’s also kind of how I met Sean.

No, there was no Sean then. He was probably living in Berlin or something. I feel like, if you’re from a romantic place like Rome, then at some point you have to move to Berlin to counter it. Sean met all these friends of mine from RISD, and they then lived together in Rome after 2009, 2010. I met Sean through those friends later at a wedding in California. And the rest is history.
Oh, also—we eloped in Rome! Sean is from Rome. He grew up in Rome, despite his name being Sean. His mom is American. And so that’s why his name is Sean.

I mean despite being Roman, his name is Sean, and it’s very funny being in Rome because of the way people pronounce Sean.

Last time we were there, we got an Uber, and I remember the driver came out and he was like, ‘See-an?’ Anyway, his parents separated when he was 10 and he and his sister moved to LA where his mom is from. I think that was an intense shift, having grown up around church bells, to all of a sudden being trapped on highways. The only thing to do was to turn to skateboarding, which is what he did. But yeah, his family’s from ancient Rome.

Like Sean has SPQR tattooed on his ass cheek.

Isn’t it jaw dropping? Oh, here comes Nino. Maybe I’ll go in the stairwell—there’s nowhere to hide in here.

I did not grow up here, but my dad got this loft in, I think, 1992. I grew up in a loft in the fish market, in the seaport, which my dad had lived in for a while before I was born. It was a very undesirable, smelly neighborhood, but if you wanted a huge, rambling, low-ceilinged loft with wooden beams for $200 a month, you could get that. And he lived there with Sylvère Lotringer, who founded Semiotext(e).

He lived there with Sylvère, and then my mom got pregnant and then Sylvère was kicked out, and she moved in. I get it now—having a child and wanting to have your own space. So I think when I was about five, my dad got this place. He ran this arts and culture magazine from here. It was called Lusitania.

There’s too much to say. Her name is Gwenn Thomas, which has now become very funny because one of the new Spider-Man characters is called Ghost-Spider, and her real name is Gwen. So Nino says that I’m Princess Ghost-Spider sometimes, but then he also calls me Gwen, which is very, very funny. My mom is a huge part of my life. She is an artist, a true artist, with a background in photography and sculpture. We can talk about our work together and understand it totally, and it’s extremely valuable.

My mom read to me. We read a lot of Beatrix Potter books. Later, I read some biographies of her and I found out she was truly wild. I think if she were a teenager today, I feel like she would be really into anime, totally goth, and she’d be so punk. Her life was basically just animals and drawing. She had a pet bat! She also kept a diary and invented her own secret alphabet so no one could read it. Because of the time she didn’t go to school after a certain age, unlike her brother, and was basically just shut up in her house. Must have been miserable. She did fall in love later with her publisher, who made a glass-sided dollhouse that she could keep mice in, to draw from for her book The Tale of Two Bad Mice. My dad read a lot of William Steig with me.

S-T-E-I-G. He was a favourite when I was growing up—God, Sean keeps texting me. I’m like, ‘Aren’t you in court???’ Also, wait, I think I can find it. Here it is. I remember my dad showing me this book when I was little, Max and Moritz—a German comic he used to read when he was a kid. I remember being very taken with it. Look at this—This copy belonged to my great-grandmother in Portugal, Maria Joana. She had a German Fräulein, and the inscription says, ‘Maria Joana, something, 1922’. It’s about two naughty boys who get into all sorts of shenanigans, but there’s one page where they get baked into this bread and it’s basically like an LSD trip.

Isn’t that amazing? They literally get baked in there. Anyway, I remember my dad showing me that and being really impressed by it—Oh my God, Sean just wrote to me, ‘Did you see the Spider-Man Apartamento cover?’ Yeah, old news dude!

Yes.

My dad put those in, and I think we’d like to make the kitchen a bedroom because loft life is a struggle, but the kitchen is such a nice room it’s hard. Living with so much of his stuff, my grandma’s stuff, it’s like the stuff of people who are not alive and then all the crap of a three-year-old—I felt like maybe there was something more to say about it, but maybe not.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I am very New York grounded, but I do feel I need to leave, but maybe it doesn’t have to be permanent. But I have dreams of getting out of here. Of not making it in the big city! Or this city.

I love them. I don’t like that one of me with the white poofs, but—

I’m not going to be like that.

The one of me in the doorway.

Well, I’ll ask Sean what he thinks.