Brad Rohloff: Creature Artist Extraordinaire

Brad Rohloff has been somewhat of an enigma to me for the past year.  I have been a huge fan of his work, but I was unable to find any information on him as a person.  I decided to take matters into my own hands and reach out to Brad with some questions. It turns out that Brad is not only a great artist, but an incredibly cool person that we can expect great things from in the future. Read my interview with Brad below.

Stephen Dorman:  For a young artist, your style seems incredibly refined and consistent.  Can you give us a timeline of how you’ve progressed as an artist?

Brad Rohloff:  Thanks!  My style comes almost entirely out of self-refinement and repetition of ideas.  I taught myself how to draw by basically doodling in class all day every day, starting in high school.  It was initially just a way to pass time in class, but I really began to do it obsessively.  I’m not kidding either, like every sheet we had in class I would just start drawing along the margins and shit like that.  It was all stupid stuff you know, the kind of shit you doodle.  But when you doodle the same thing over and over, you refine it and refine it and keep working out how it exists as a form.  

I feel like that process exists a lot in my work now, I have a lot of sketchbooks full of rough shapes and weird parts of creatures.  When I draw a fully formed creature I almost ‘cut and paste’ from a visual library I’ve built up.  Sometimes you can see it too, where different elements are recurring or are mixed in across different works.  Also the bold lines I feel like I picked up from working almost exclusively in Flash for a large portion of high school.

SD:  What’s the story of “The G8KPR”?  He seems to show up in a lot of your work.  

BR:  This may seem dumb, but he’s partially based on a band called Gatekeeper.  They sound like crazy 80’s synthy horror soundtracks and I’m really into that.  The image itself has little to do with the band though, I mainly worked off of the name.  He’s like some kind of intergalactic wizard who can open portals to different worlds by spreading open his coat and melting.  That seems weird and I’ve never explicitly told people that haha. I kind of like to just put them out there and see how people react.  Plus I like how he looks.

SD: He definitely looks awesome.  Do a lot of your characters have stories?

BR: Like with the G8KPR, I have some minor and some large stories behind some of my characters. I’ve never written a narrative out for any of them though and I’ve never really worked with comics, though I feel like I should. I think I’m partially afraid of spelling out narratives for my characters because then I feel it loses some of the vague interpretations I want people to get. But at the same time I don’t want it to be too opaque! But maybe I’m just over-thinking it!

I guess I’m still working on integrating more narrative in my work. All these characters do exists in the same ‘universe’ though.

SD:  You seem to really enjoy animation.  I noticed that you recently posted a rough cut of an animated short.  Do you see yourself doing a lot of that in the future?

BR:  I love animation!  I think it shows a lot in my non-animated work.  I went to school with the intention of studying animation, but it’s taken me a year to finally take a course on it.  I was busy taking some other courses I was interested in.  The way my school is structured is that you can take classes in any department, so I’ve really been taking advantage of that.  But I feel like I’m really narrowing my concentration down to Animation and Printmaking.  

I’m taking more animation courses in the future so expect much, much more!  Someday I would like to make or work on my own cartoon/a cartoon.  It’s been like a minor dream of mine and if I could do that I would be so pumped.

SD:  You have done some work for music blogs like Cactus Mouth and Flashlight Tag, and also art for bands like Galapagos, Houses, and Ricky Eat Acid.  How does music play a part in your artwork?  

BR:  I listen to a lot of different music when I work.  I’m particularly a fan of weird electronic music and a lot of ambient/drone stuff.  I like to listen to music that makes me calm or that I can passively listen to while working.  

I don’t really consider myself a ‘music nerd’, though I am friends with a lot of them so I guess it rubs off haha.  I guess music does play a large part in my work though, like with G8KPR it can be superficial elements such as the name or something bigger like ‘I will always associate this drawing with this song’.  Also since most of these people are friends of mine I feel like part of it is responding to their music, if that doesn’t seem dumb to say.  It’s like, I can’t make (good) music, so instead I draw within the context of music.  I want them to see how I react to their creativity with a different form of creativity.  That’s getting a little conceptual, but I like to play around with that idea of creative response through different mediums.

SD:  Earlier in the year you were doing a lot of work that involved the inverted cross as a central design element.  What inspires a re-occurring element like that?

BR:  I got really interested in the inverted cross and other weird occult-ish symbols because of how quickly they could make something seem fundamentally ‘evil’ or ‘unholy’.  I thought these associations were really fascinating, so I explored them as a design element.  

In my mind I was trying to work with subverting or toying with the symbology and associations that people had with these, but I felt like that wasn’t coming across as much as I had wanted to so I haven’t used them extensively as of late.  I also think they look cool, so it definitely had to do superficially with exploring that aesthetic.

SD:  What are your future goals?

BR:  Like I said earlier, creating or working on a cartoon would be awesome.  As I’ve been exploring animation I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it and enjoying it a lot.  Working with Adult Swim would be high on my list of goals.  

I’m also very interested in printmaking so a career in that field would be great.  I’m really inspired by people like Chad Kouri and the Post family, Chicago based printmakers that just own a space and make work they want to make.  They stay afloat and are kicking some ass, so I feel maybe someday I could be in a collective or something like that.  For me, money isn’t really the main focus.  As long as I get to work and create during my life I feel like I will be satisfied.

SD:  Anything else you want to add for our readers? 

BR:  I’m pretty awkward in person!

To see more of Brad’s art head over to his tumblr.  You can also purchase prints or stickers via his online store.