Name: José Goz
Country: Spain
Lives in: Poland, Poznan
Instagram: @josegozz
Me & my art story
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.
What drawing gives me that other techniques can’t
I will always remember something that a cherish teacher of mine once told me:
“To draw is to dream, and to dream is to create magic”.
I’m certain any artistic medium allows artists to pursue their specific goals. Mine, particularly, reflects on the drawing language above the rest and I find in there the tools I need in order to resume what I have in mind.
And, going back to that quote, it is true that there is magic in taking a blank white page and fill it with life, with a message, a story, emotions; but also, power and responsibility.
My love for comic
For me, comic is a very broad language that allows you to tell anything. As long as you have something to say, there are millions of possibilities you can explore by doing comics. My ideas, or the genesis for my stories, are a result of what I do in life.
I try to always let myself be open to inspiration, even during times where it seems very hard to get a hold of it. So literally anything can be acknowledged as an inspiration from a story. From buildings facades, to people in the shop, to a bird flying, the colour of the sky, the shape of a box, the lyrics of a song or the conversation you might have with someone else.
Everything is a source of inspiration and can turn out to be a great story.
I remember reading comics in my childhood like Mortadelo y Filemón, 13, Rue del Percebe, Asterix y Obélix, Lucky Luke or Tintín amongst others so it is something that has always been there along the way for me. But, funny thing, I’d always find myself stopping in certain pages to recreate another story in my head. Somehow they provided me certain scenes to explore universes I created on the go spending hours upon hours looking at the same goddamn page. That’s why I think I ended up doing it. It allows to create everything, another reality, up until the very last detail, and fill it in with stories.
Suboart Magazine 