José Goz

I ask myself constantly who I am and I’ll just say: I’m José Goz, visual artist and illustrator, comic teacher in the University of Arts Magdalena Abakanowicz in Poznan and a human being, emphasis on “being”.

My introduction into plastic mediums, at least in an educative manner, was a bit later than people would expect. As far as I can remember and from an early age, I’ve always been driven to expressive outlets, especially drawing. But perhaps, most impactfully, what really determined me getting into Art College was my music studies. I started to play clarinet around 7 and, in a town lost in Murcia, that was basically one of the few limited contacts I had with an artistic medium.

Later on, I realized how much I enjoyed the expressive abilities you can reach through music and wonder what it would be through a plastic language. That’s why, when the time came, and given my clear inclinations towards drawing, I decided to follow my instinct and try out Fine Arts in university.

Music vs Visual arts

There is always something magical for me in combining two expressive outlets as music and drawing, even though they are, in a way, very apart from each other.

Personally, inspiration comes in many shapes, from things I see when I walk the streets in my mask, overwhelming landscapes or a song I listen to in a certain moment.

And that’s what I also try mimic and explore in my work; that not only the eye takes place into reading plastic story.

My current work

Right now, I’m working in my latest comic and focused, as I mentioned before, in the reading experience and how to challenge the reader into facing, perhaps, something they don’t expect a comic to be like.

The idea comes from long evenings I spent with my grandmother at her house in the hot summer of Murcia and how, while having conversations about life, cigarettes and food recipes, I clicked the recording button in my phone. For a long time, I’ve been holding on to those recordings thinking about doing something special with them and, I guess the time has come.

As I said, I tend to combine many things in my work, especially architecture and geography points of views, which modify the way I understand the result to be like. The narrative, which is basically my grandmother’s life anecdotes, will be told through the transformation of space, in this case, my hometown, Santomera. The project is a retrospective on life in that rural spaces from south Spain, filled with the memory and recollections of an old lady.

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