Mobee remembers immersing himself in words at a young age—from novels and poetry, to sports magazines and dictionaries. “Other than a boxy scribble of a dollar store superhero in the margins here and there, I operated under the assumption that my hands had very little visual art in ‘em,” he says. “I finished second in a children’s book competition when I was 10. Every leg in that notebook paper tome looked like bent taffy somewhat chewed.”
Mobee recalls discovering his artistic inspiration in a very particular way. He confesses that while in school, he had a crush on the writing of Federico García Lorca. “Particularly, his fleshing out of duende—that lifted expression or evocation of feeling, form, and the core of things in certain works of art,” he explains. “I have never clasped hands with Lorca’s duende. It doesn’t return my texts. It inspires me to try, to at least see it hanging out at the bar someday. Buy it a drink and then go on my merry way.”
Mobee, however, didn’t immerse himself into visual art until about four years ago. “I broke up with my ex-fiance and found a new self in the wake of an 18-month nervous breakdown. Hadn’t really drawn before, but I figured, why the fuck not? I started drawing Mobee—a pink TV that hangs out with cartoon characters and facilitates drunken puns. It was crude, unrefined, and everything that my head is and was.”
Mobee attended university for creative writing, but says he has no visual arts education to speak of. “I’ve learned visual art through skewed photographic recall, long hours, trial and error, and feeling shit out with a bit of mania and sleeplessness,” he says “I’ve only really drawn seriously for about three years, so my education is ongoing. That mostly consists of gawking at street art and magazines and interwebs and YouTube videos and scratching my head while nursing a five-dollar coffee.”
He describes his art as “a beer tap, or a spiritual beer bong reversed.” He adds that art just floods out and then he dives hard into it and loses track of breathing. “Afterwards, a finished product hangs out on the other side to confuse me. I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing, so maybe this is all bullshit. It probably is. I just go and go and go and stop and go again.”
Contributing to his unique style of sketching, Mobee says he sees every source photo as a lead musician, a singer or a Coltrane saxophone blast. “It’s my job to colour outside the margins and give it a different sort of life. Every portrait is a riff, a rhythm at that moment. Some of them skronk and get all ugly and muddy. Some of them lilt and dream, at least hopefully.”
If you study Mobee’s portfolio, you will see plenty of musical influences and musicians as subjects. He explains why. “The world hasn’t made a lot of sense to me, except for music. Music doesn’t make sense, either,” he says. “But, it doesn’t make sense in the most arms-open of ways. We may not agree on the big issues or our DoorDash orders, but we can build meaningful and fun conversations about the music we hear. Even when it isn’t playing.”
Mobee’s creative process starts in a hole. “Every piece I do is my gut, my eye, my humor, or my nervous system at a given moment. I go into a hole with my pens and come out with a moment on a piece of paper,” he explains. “And since my sense of self is skewed and fluid, those moments aren’t the easiest to tap back into. So, I have to draw again.”
Mobee is currently working on a concept for a graphic novella and a series of interpretations of his favorite album covers. He adds: “I’ll be opening up a merch store of some sort soonish, but I’m just really not so good at all that. More portraits and random impulses, a bunch of slaps. My future projects are just as murky as my future, and that’s kinda cool.”
Follow Mobee on Instagram at @popfilteranx.
