Q&A w/ Jacob "PEP" Pepper
Finding Balance in Creativity
The nature of creativity is typically chaotic, with raw ideas flying around wildly, making the process frustrating but simultaneously interesting and exciting. Part of crafting disparate ideas into a comprehensive product that makes sense to others is a study in creating balance.
Visual artists must consider individual elements such as size, color, texture, and their relation to each other.
In music, the balance between tones, frequencies,and instruments is essential. Even authors must find strategies to balance their sentences to hold equal weight to effectively express a message.
In our conversation with creative director and artist Jacob “Pep” Pepper, we gather his perspective on merging ideas to create cohesion and unity as an artist.
You have several specific pieces of work in the style of a collage that contain a wide variety of hand-drawn elements across the canvas that individually might seem disconnected but collectively create a cohesive idea. What’s key for you to establish connectivity between each individual image when crafting these sorts of projects?
I often believe that two opposites can go together where I think most people don't. I believe opposites do work together, in this world where we have categorized things. So I am trying to seamlessly break that and I think there's various ways to do it. I just want to create oppositions that I find attractive.
In your bio, you attribute your influences to hip-hop and graffiti cultures as well as elements of the earth. The former is typically associated with dense metropolitan cities, while the latter is connected to rural and naturally preserved spaces of nature. Can you talk about your connection to both of those spaces and why they share such equal weight in your work?
I grew up in a rural area north of San Francisco in farm country. I grew up learning about the outside and I even was taken far deep into the forest where I never really wanted to go but I definitely learned from it. I believe in plant medicine pretty deeply, even though I have also done a lot of Western medicine. That's really where my earthbound stuff comes from.
In my early adolescence I started listening to rap music so I got to learn about a different world through that. It led me to going to college in Sacramento and living in my first real dense urban multicultural environment. That's when my friend group expanded to a wide range of different cultures and backgrounds. It really just led me to realizing that my interests were very similar in that range.
Can you share a little bit of your philosophy on how to create visual balance when working with a diverse set of fonts, icons, shapes, and textures?
I use a lot of my design experience and my love for that type of visual esthetic and I strategically put shit together. Tattoo artists and tattoo culture has really inspired the way I have approached art. When you go to a tattoo parlor, you look at hundreds of pre-sketched out things. Those things at a base level I found immediate inspiration around because I am obsessed with them.
I often sketch a thing, find its place and sketch another thing and find its place and then the result would be like, there's a lot of open space, how do I fill it out? And I think people are often getting tattoos that way. I just approach it in a very similar method.
When creating a piece that is what are your hopes for that moment of interaction?
I've dealt with depression throughout my entire life and at its base level I begin to feel very empty inside or sad. I think I've always treated it as anger but it's really been sadness and emptiness and feeling of loss. So at face value, that is what I want you to see but my hopes and dreams are that eventually people will dig, deeper, and look inside this empty place to find a world that is full of emotion, full of feelings, and full of art that expresses all of those things and not just pure sadness.
I am full of inspiration and full of drive and resiliency. I have a lot of different feelings and emotions and I tend to express them in various ways, but I think that's what I'm trying to focus on.
What’s one tool, lesson, philosophy, you think every creative person should have?
Follow your own lead.