Featured Artist: Henry Sowell

Q: How would you describe your style as an artist? 

A: I would say intuitively, I kind of just go. Like I don’t really do a whole lot of planning typically. Especially with photography, a lot of it’s very spontaneous. 

Q: Are there any artists that you draw inspiration from?

A: Have you seen any Miyazaki movies? Like,Studio Ghibli?  I’m a huge fan of that work. I like to do lots of nature stuff, and I started watching those movies as a kid that portrayed nature as a very whimsical, mysterious thing. So definitely him.

Q: What are some of your favorite pieces that you’ve done?

A: I have [a photo] that I took two years ago where I was very proud of not just the end product but how I got there. We were in the ceramics room and I put my phone flashlight facing up on one of the pottery wheels and I turned it, like, spinning around and I stood up and took a photo of it down with a long exposure. It made this like really cool ring of light that went around it. It looked like a very weird abstract-y photo, and I was super happy with that.

Q: How do you approach making art?

A: Recently, [with] the layers project I did, I was really happy about how it turned out, because I had no idea where I was going to end up, but I just kind of kept going. Rather than being like, ‘Oh, I’ll mess it up,’ I was like ‘I don’t care’ because I had no attachment to the piece whatsoever. That approach helped me just be like ‘Well, this might look good.’

Q: Do you put meaning into your art before you make it, or do you find the meaning after?

A: “Kind of a 50/50. With the layers project, my whole thing was that it meant nothing. And that was just me working on something. But I put in random tiny little details that people could latch onto and then make up some cool story behind it. Like I wrote in random numbers on my [project] that you can only see if you happen to catch the light just right. Or I painted the inside of these bells in a project two different colors, and other weird stuff like that. It means nothing, but I was kind of like, ‘ooh, somebody might like it — at least if they look at it long enough.’ They’ll find some little nuggets of information that might make them feel interested even though I know it means nothing.

Q: How did you get into art?

A: Freshman year in August I asked my dad about a Nikon D-50 and I was like, ‘Hey, can I just take this and go take pictures’ and he was like, ‘Sure.’ For three months I took at least 200 pictures a day just trying to figure out how the camera worked and stuff. I didn’t look up any tutorials or anything, I just kind of just did it. I just figured it out. And I kept taking pictures for the next two-ish years. Then my sophomore year I cleaned up this dark room I made at my grandma’s house, which was nice because it was my own little workspace (no matter how janky it was — it was a tiny room with basically no air conditioning.) So I was using that in the summer, it was basically like a little closet. So just more recently, I was like, I should do more mixed media stuff because I like building things. So it’s only been more recently that I’ve been actually making stuff.

Q: Where do you want to take art after high school?

A: I don’t know, I’m figuring that out right now, I guess. I’m going to college but probably for something unrelated like therapy or beekeeping — beekeepers get paid a lot! I don’t see myself reasonably doing art as a career because I feel like I enjoy it too much to want to make it a career. I want to be able to make what I want to make.