An Interview with Mara Ramirez
Art School catches up with artist and instructor Mara Ramirez!
We chat about the relationship between education and art making, what it’s like to work collaboratively in the studio, and how they started their self-publishing collective, Freak Comics. Read on for more!
Also, check out their upcoming courses:
Telling Your Story - begins Feb 9, 2021
and Figure Drawing for Youth - begins Feb. 24, 2021
Sharing, by Mara Ramirez
Image description: an expressively drawn outdoor scene, done in color on black paper. The scene features a figure, whose body is also a house, running while fixing their hair. A house with an oversized bird’s nest is off to the right, and in the foreground a dead bird is splayed out on the ground, with a plastic soda bottle ring holder around its neck and x’s for eyes.
AS: Can you tell me a bit about how you developed your drawing style? Mark-making, expressive line quality, text, and narrative elements all feel intrinsically important to your work.
MR: I think my drawing style emerged directly from an urgency to communicate what is in my head. I am a really impulsive drawer most of the time (I think drawing is my favorite because itself is an impulsive, immediate medium). I draw to express something I’m feeling in the moment. So, mark making and expressive line quality come through as a byproduct. The lines that I make generally reflect the mood I’m trying to portray.
Drawing is the residue of a process. And I like to show my process!
AS: I'm so interested in the collaborative nature of your art practice; for example your comic artist collective, Freak Comics, as well as your submission-based zine project, Safe Spaces. What draws you to working collaboratively, in a field typically associated with solitude and individuality?
MR: I love this question! I think collaboration is a beautiful thing that is both fun and deeply affirming. My favorite way to make friends is through projects, which also keeps me accountable to get goals that I set for myself done, because someone else is relying on me. Freak was one of the easiest projects to start because it was something that automatically connected us with other comic makers, not just in the Bay but all over the world.
Safe Spaces came out of a need for making space for survivors of sexual violence. I made the first one probably around the same time as the Kavanaugh trials. For some folks who experienced violence, the air felt heavy and everything was triggering. The project felt like I, and everyone submitting, was completely subverting the reality of the rape culture we live in.
What’s so beautiful about Safe Spaces is that it outgrew our expectations for what it was going to be and became …. not a space for rehashing our trauma, but instead a space of deep healing. It’s not that we avoided talking about the hard stuff, quite the contrary. But instead of details about the harm, it always ended up that submissions took the shape of poetic expressions of how trauma sticks with us and how it changes us. The submissions because testaments of our tenacity and ability to keep going, and in turn, begin to heal. Because anyone could publish literally anything they want to, because I was willing to handwrite every word that they sent me, or illustrate their poems, because I passed their words and experiences through my body…into a book!....they would know that I hear them and that they deserve to be heard by others as well.
Honestly, I think that doing this work only feels right! I have a platform, and I have the skills of knowing how to put together a book, I know how to make others feel heard and held…..why not use those skills to hold space for something I think is important?
Safe Spaces, by Mara Ramirez
Image description: a drawing comprised mostly of blue lines, featuring a detailed hill/field filled with flowers and plants. A sun and a bird creep over a horizon at the top of the composition, while in the right foreground, an abstracted figure enters a cave.
AS: What is Freak Comics' origin story? How did it begin, and why did you and your cohorts decide to start it?
MR: Freak was born late one night at Specs (a bar on Columbus St, in SF.) It was probably about midnight and Miles and Cristian and I were talking comics as usual. I remember being excited because I had just found my way to making real comics after feeling like drawing was never enough for me to feel satisfied. I felt l had found a home. I brought up to them this idea I had a while ago about printing zines for folks and helping them make them if they never had before (I found a xerox printer somewhere, maybe goodwill, that worked!) We talked about what it would look like to create and hold space for comics, and what we felt like was missing. We saw a hole in the “art scene”.....one that we would fit in if it was there. The Bay Area has such a rich history of underground comix. Through rising rents and gentrification, over my lifetime the cultural make up of the city has been altered so much, and poor people and artists are being pushed out left and right. We wanted to fill that lacuna where comics used to be, and make space for the new comic artists to be held up.
Flea, by Mara Ramirez
Image description: 5 comic panels, each done on a separate post-it note. The post it note panels each depict and label something “Flea” doesn’t like. The list includes: when people don’t shake her hand upon meeting her, keeping plants, cops, people reminding her that she is small, douchebags, and brats.
AS: You've mentioned to me that you believe your art practice and teaching practice are closely related. Can you expand on that? How do the two practices influence each other for you?
MR: I try to create the brainspace that I conjure up when I’m working alone in my own practice; through the flow of the lectures, exercises, discussions, and assignments I plan. I try to mimic the flow that feels the best for me and drawing. In my drawing, I flow between different modes of drawing and thinking, which keeps me engaged and excited. I flow between drawing from imagination, to memory, to observation, and back again. I float between mindfulness and dissociation; seriousness and humor. Interconnectedness feels important to both my art and teaching practice in the way that jumping around on these spectrums can lead the viewer or student into my stream of consciousness, which is both abstract and the best way to get the feelings of what I’m trying to articulate across.
For example. I could just plainly tell you about different artists and the ways they relate to a movement we are studying, or how they employ an element or principle of design. Instead in lectures, I try to connect the artists with their identities, how they relate to the world, and how they relate to each other, throughout time and space. I like to connect things we are learning about in lectures directly with exercises, because I am someone who learns through doing, who gets restless with long stretches of only utilizing one mode of learning. If we are talking about thoughtforms and the shapes of feelings, we will be doing automatic drawings. If we are talking about sketchbooking, we will be doing mindfulness exercises. And so on. Projects are similarly holistic, tying in all these different modes of thinking.
Looking, by Mara Ramirez
Image description: Four figures in their underwear and with two knots of hair on their head, each drawn in a playful contour outline, explore and climb over an abstract pink shape that resembles the interior of an empty box.
6. Tell me about one particularly memorable student (or teacher!).
I think one of my favorite people to make art with is a 3 year old I watch. She is so focused and in her own world when she makes, it is so beautiful to see. She happily paints, her paintbrush dancing around the page, talking to herself the entire time, telling the story of the marks. She teaches me so much!
Addie, by Mara Ramirez
Image description: a six paneled comic, done in a gestural drawing style with a lot of line, that shows an adult artist drawing with a child artist. The artists talk to each other, work on their own drawings, and the last panel shows them working on the same drawing together.
AS: Do you feel that any of your experiences as a student influence your teaching practice?
MR: Definitely! I love learning. Teaching is learning. I love the fluidity. I think when I’m teaching I’m always trying to think about what was helpful for me to grasp the concepts I’m trying to get across. I love to try to create the environment and the special parameters that allow for guidance but also, freedom. Most people feel sort of lost when a teacher says, “do whatever you want”. When I was learning a medium, I certainly didn’t learn as much as I possibly could when professors didn’t set up parameters. I think the parameters inspire more than constrict (depending on how dynamic the parameters are). They set up the borders within which to operate. They supply something to bounce off of, and respond to. When everyone in the class is also working in these parameters, they all take it in such different directions, and its inspiring to see the different explanations of the same prompt, in community. It becomes a conversation, instead of making something that feels like you’re yelling into the void.
Borders, by Mara Ramirez
Image description: an eight paneled comic drawn in a free, immediate-feeling, abstracted style. The comic panels show: a close up of two legs with pubic hair and a vagina, a doll-like figure cut in half, an cliff landscape, a figure speaking into a speech bubble with the anatomy of her organs - lungs, brain, etc- showing under her skin, a close up portrait of someone wearing a mask, a figure nursing a baby, two figures kissing, and a sunset over an ocean.
AS: You see your work as autobiographical, and related to intimacy, trauma, and healing. How do you make decisions about how much to share with the world, and what stories to tell?
MR: Oh good question. I don’t really know the answer to this question. I follow my gut mostly. I deeply value vulnerability, and see it as a tool to connect and validate others. I think stories are the signal between the noise. All I ever wish is that some people, somewhere, see a little bit of themselves in the work, and because of that….. feel less alone.
On Being Unknowable, by Mara Ramirez
Image description: A line drawing done in ink, showing a two-headed figure with a drawn line down its middle. On the left side of the line, text reads, “Do I feel a sort of sorrow?” on the right side, text reads, “Is this is a sort of super power?” The figure is mostly a simple outline, but culminates into two more intricate, prominent feet wearing ribbed socks with strappy sandals with heels and thick soles that stand on a loopy circle. One sandal has the word “two” in the strap, and the other sandal has the word “left feet” written on the heel and sole. A caption above the figure reads, “On being unknowable.”
Want to learn with Mara? Check out their upcoming courses with Art School!
Telling Your Story
How can we tell a story with no words? How do text and image interact? How does color influence my message? Explore the medium of water soluble wax pastels while learning how to incorporate narrative into art making through mindfulness exercises, drawing the world around us, and delving into our subconscious.
February 9 - March 30, 2021
Figure Drawing for Youth
Learn how to see and translate 3D to paper with intensive figure drawing. We will be using soft materials to empathize with the organic shapes and movement of the human body. Observational drawing and technical skills will be emphasized, creating a meditative environment where all students engage together in creative concentration. This can be healing and grounding, individually and on a group basis.
February 24 - April 28, 2021
About Mara:
Mara Ramirez is an artist, educator, and caregiver making comics in the Bay Area, California. Their comics are mainly autobiographical and somewhat experimental, and concern matters of intimacy, trauma, and healing. They play with abstraction and the action of mark making as a means of distorting (and in doing so, clarifying) their own experiences through the filter of emotion and memory. These stories range in content: existentialism, gender, and childcare are some of the topics that have emphasis.
In addition to their work as a nanny, artist, and teacher, Mara is also a collaborator. They are ⅓ of the founders and organizers of FREAK COMICS, a comics collective that self publishes anthologies and indie work, as well as organizing community events for comics lovers, and traveling internationally to table at book fairs and comic festivals. They have worked with Chapter 510, illustrating stories that middle schoolers have written. They have also worked with Poster Syndicate, a local printmaking group that brings art and design to many different movements, in hopes that their message can be seen and heard more loudly. They help organize in two different mutual aid projects across the Bay Area, from Bay Bridge Solidarity, prioritizing the needs of unhoused neighbors, to IAFS, an independent, up and coming, horizontally taught free school that “prioritizes mutual aid and democracy in order to foster art and learning in the wakes of SFAI's closure, the Coronavirus Pandemic, the intensifying crisis in higher education, rapid climate change, and worldwide movements for economic and racial justice.”
You can find mara’s work at https://planetmars.earth/ or on their instagram @planetmars.earth