Jason Sturgill: Don’t Give Up
Last year, we hosted an All Day Communion with lots of wonderful guest speakers. We had some of these talks transcribed and published in our first ever newspaper, which celebrated one whole year of Communion. 100% of the proceeds from the paper go to Papyrus UK, a charity that works hard to prevent young suicide in the UK. You can buy the paper here, and listen to all of our previous guest talks here.
We know that watching videos and buying publications isn’t always accessible to everyone, so we thought we’d put the transcribed talks up on the blog too. We hope you enjoy them.
I met Jason in a bar in Portland and continued to follow his work on Instagram. His work is brilliant. It’s simple, brilliant illustrations. At least once a week Jason’s stuff completely stops me in my tracks. Jason, tell me who you are and what you do.
I'm still figuring it out what I do exactly. It’s been a long winding road to get to where I am now, and it’s not been something that I could have ever predicted. I grew up in a small town near Portland, a very religious conservative town and not very diverse, not a lot of exposure to the arts and things like that. So to end up being an illustrator and have the life that I have now - I wouldn't have predicted that at all.
You were born in 76? So you grew up in the early 90s grunge kind of thing. Tell me what your childhood sounded like, smelled like and tasted of.
It was sort of that grunge era but in middle school, I was listening to everything from N.W.A to Depeche Mode, that was like the spectrum of my taste. There was like new wave and then even Nine Inch Nails. I had a very eclectic music taste. I was fortunate enough that the town I grew up in had a small Independent record store that I hung out at all the time, and so that was one of my main influences - that and skateboarding were the two things that really influenced me. So that was definitely the sound of my childhood. It was such a conservative small town but somehow through that record store, I got exposed to a lot of great stuff.
The little town I grew up in had three record stores, one of which is still going; Nervous Records. It’s in the top 10 record stores in the UK, and only sells second hand records. Hanging around there on a Saturday, leafing through records I had never heard of, talking to the people that owned it, and they took the piss out of the first thing that I bought because I was like 12 or 13 and I didn't know what was what. I asked for the new Barry Manilow single and everyone laughed and you kind of think OK, there's something I've learned today, do you have any Human League? So you end up kind of being shaped, sometimes roughly and sometimes with care. The power of those small record stores was massively underrated at the time and we miss them now. Tell me about what your childhood tasted like.
Ok so the tastes definitely were bland. In a small town - and I grew up fairly lower to middle class and so we didn't go out to restaurants much, there wasn't a lot in the way of restaurants. So it was like homework and microwave meals. I was raised by a single Mom until I was in middle school and so a lot of it was just spam. They had hungry man meals - like these meals that were just really basic stuff, that was what my Mom cooked a lot. I remember liking Hungarian goulash and noodles. I remember coming home from school and taking a whole roll of Ritz crackers and peanut butter and devouring the whole thing. In terms of taste it's almost embarrassing to admit, but I had such a non-existing culinary life - I didn't even try salad until I was in my late 20s/early 30s. When I was in my 20s after college I’d be eating like Kraft mac and cheese, the most basic stuff. It was really my wife who introduced me to better food. It's kind of embarrassing how sheltered I was from food growing up and in my case, I just did not want to try new foods. We have a 10 year old and it's hard to see him eat, cos he's pretty picky, and knowing that that's the way I was when I was a kid I'm like, “oh there's so much amazing food that you have to try”. But I guess kids are that way. And I was too until I was in my 20s.
I think it's more common than you think. I remember the first time we had avocado, it would have been about 1979 I was about 11 and I remember my mum had read in a magazine about this thing “The Avocado Panel”. She cut it in half but it was rock hard and she chiselled out the stone and she'd read that you put mayonnaise in the middle. So she served up this rock hard lump with a dollop of mayonnaise, and none of us knew what to do but we couldn't get a spoon in it. It put me off avocados for probably a decade actually and the same with parmesan - when we had it for the first time it was pre-grated in a cardboard tube with a plastic lid. The first time we had it I just smelled it and I couldn't understand why you would put that on your dinner.
The first time I had avocado toast was actually in London and I feel like it all of a sudden exploded in America after I came back from that trip. Now you see it everywhere, but it was a fun find when we were over in the UK.
Tell me about the smells. What was the history of your town? What was your town famous for, what did it make, what did it do?
It's a paper mill town, so there is a very distinct smell. It’s not a particularly nice one. I grew up with it so I never really thought about it until my wife would come visit my Mom or something and be like, “What is that smell?” To me it doesn’t have a smell, because I grew up surrounded by it. I always wonder... I got cancer in my early 20s and it’s really uncommon to get cancer when you’re so young.. I never broke any bones but I've had some traumatic accidents growing up and I guess cancer, in terms of the different things that have happened to me, I sort of had the best sort of experience if that's possible. I went into the hospital and they didn't know what was going on but they didn't think it was a big deal. I had like this exploratory surgery and then when I came to, they were like, “Well it turns out you had cancer, but the good thing is we got rid of it.” So I didn't have to go through chemotherapy or anything like that, I had to have four follow ups which definitely weren’t fun but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I was pretty lucky in that regard.
Bloody hell Jason. What kind of cancer was it?
Bladder.
Man alive. So how old were you?
27.
27. Oh my God so at that point - did you go to college?
Yeah so I was in Washington state, where I grew up, and I ended up - you know, I wanted to get as far away from home as I could. So I went to the other end of the state, Washington State University. I studied marketing randomly, and when I look back at those times I don't remember any of my classes, I don't remember any of the educational part of school but I was really involved in a lot of the extracurricular activities. I ran the entertainment committee so I put on all the concerts for the school. They’d give me $20,000 a year and then I would have to spend it all during that year and bring in whoever I wanted to. I was also a DJ at the radio station so those two things were really formative in terms of where my career was headed. I ended up starting a record label during that time, just sort of through being a DJ and being exposed to indie labels and putting on all the shows and meeting bands, it was kind of a logical step to start my own label. I found out I could get college credit for starting a business, being a marketing major, so those were the experiences I took away from school.
College credit for doing the thing that you wanted to do anyway, that’s great. Who were you listening to back then?
Doing the college radio, that's when I really got into indie pop and that was kind of my thing at the time. That's actually how I met my wife. So at the time Papas Fritas were like one of the first bands that really got me into indie pop and then Belle and Sebastian. I’m trying to think of my... I put a playlist up on Spotify of one of my radio shows, I made a playlist based off of that. We had a couple of different venues that I could put shows on, I had Henry Rollins come and do a spoken word and we had Foo Fighters right when they formed. I had a show where the headliner was Modest Mouse so that's how and I met Modest Mouse, they played house shows in this town that I went to, so I had asked them if I could start a label, and I did a 7 inch record with them.
That's incredible. It's very timely - one of the leading thinkers in education, Ken Robinson, died yesterday. I was fortunate enough to spend a bit of time, not with him but with his family, over the years and I'm not knocking education cos it's run by amazing people. Teachers are incredible, I completely get that, but the system seems to have forgotten how much it needs to change. I don't mean we should all start coding and stuff, I just mean the way it engages people. I just wonder what it would be like, these students are just the most amazing bright incredible people and they are brimming with phenomenal ideas and they have these incredible ways of communication, expressing themselves. And then when it comes to leaving they figuratively and literally shoehorn themselves into a suit and they go looking for work. My clients, who are big boring companies like Unilever, Coca Cola and Samsung, they’ve now started looking for something different. They’re looking for the weird kids. But the weird kids have a suit on and they’ve cut their hair and shaved their moustache and they’re missing each other. There must be a way we can change education. So what did you do after university, Jason?
As I was getting toward the end of my marketing degree, I was realising through starting a record label and helping design that record with the drummer from Modest Mouse and also while I was doing the concerts - commissioning gig poster artists to make posters for the shows, or I was designing the posters myself. I actually ended up working at the campus design studio, it was just me and another guy and anybody could come and we would design posters for them or whatever. I was realising that design was actually what I was more interested in, and I had been exposed to advertising a little bit when I was a kid. I played tennis and I went to an agency in Portland to do a consumer feedback thing and I was amazed with the people that were doing that for a living. So I was like oh I want to go into advertising and so when I graduated I moved to Portland. I knew I was going to go to Portland, growing up 45 minutes away I would go there to see shows all the time when I was in high school. I loved it so moved to Portland and the goal was to work at Wieden and Kennedy, that was like the shining star in terms of cool places to be, if you're not going to work at Nike. My first job was a small agency internship as an account person, since my degree was in marketing I couldn't get a creative internship at first. I was working at a telemarketing job at the same time, trying to pay for the tiny apartment I had but with the goal always to get out. I was working at small agencies and then finally got an interview through having a friend at Wieden and Kennedy. I got a job there after several years of wanting to get in and the whole time I was like, “how do I get into this doing creative work?” I looked at going to art schools and wanted to be an art director. That was the time when I got cancer too, so I was at this place and I ended up doing strategy first, when I first got into Wieden, and I was an interactive producer - this was during the first dot.com boom. After the dot.com bust we went from a department of 15 people down to just two of us and they even wanted to reduce that more, to just one person. I got the opportunity to move into strategy and worked strategy on Nike. I was always kind of interested in what was happening in youth culture and a lot of things that people weren't aware of - I was always sending agency emails out about this new art show or gig. Sneaker culture was just starting to pop up and I went to a sneaker-head event in California, so I was doing all these things that were kind of revolving around youth culture for Nike, but in terms of writing briefs and things like that - that was not my thing. I like doing all of the culture vulture type of work around knowing trends and things, but actually doing the real work of a strategist and writing the briefs, that’s not me.
At what point did you realise that you were talented and you weren't kind of just making it up? At what point did you realise you have something, Jason?
I think some people get that confidence and realise they're doing the thing that they were born to do and I grew up with you know, seeing the kid that was in class that could draw and being like, oh that's what they were born to do, they can draw, they're creative. I didn't draw growing up at all, I didn't necessarily think I was creative at all growing up, so I still sort of second guess what I’m doing. It takes people seeing my work and giving me the encouragement to keep going at it. There's been plenty of times where I'm like okay, this isn't going anywhere, I don't think I have it. Last year I won an award from the Society of Illustrators so I think that was the real turning point of realising, I'm being recognised by all these people that I have always looked up to. I think that was the point where I felt like I'd sort of made it. When I went up on stage in New York City and I'm surrounded by my heroes, I felt like I fit in for once. I've had moments where I'll have this wave of like, okay I'm riding this high of being recognised and having this job. The East London Comics and Arts Festival (ELCAF) - there was somebody Simon Peplow who’s an illustrator out there and he invited me to be part of this collective called the Out Crowd Collective which had a bunch of my favourite artists in. There were all these artists that I've always looked up to and to be a part of that group, we had a table together there, these sort of moments that have made me think maybe there's something here, maybe I should keep going.
Sometimes, Jason, we all need a better mirror. We all look in the mirror and it's like going to the fairground - we don't see what we truly are, we see this limited version of ourselves. How do you deal with finding the better reflection of you?
A lot of this is talked about in my work more recently. For those people that haven't seen my work - I was diagnosed with bipolar two years ago and so a lot of my work revolves around that - dealing with impostor syndrome and dealing with depression and just trying to stay positive. I think doing that work and seeing the response that I get from that, is another form of encouragement that helps me realise that people get me. I get messages or comments where people are like, “this helped me get through the day.” There's other people going through these types of things and I think that’s what really pushes me to continue my work.
Where do you feel free? I know you used to skateboard - do you still express yourself on the board now?
Yeah actually, when we had our son that was one of the things that I was looking forward to - skating with him. There is a skate park we go to, but unfortunately I had a pretty bad fall last time we skated together and I got bad nerve damage from it. So at that point I was just like, I don't need to do this anymore. I don't need to risk something happening. I worked at Nike skateboarding and so I had access to the Nike skateboarding park and I would go there, that was like my workout. But now I feel for my age, I mean I know there are pro skaters my age and older, but for me it's not worth the risk of hurting my arm or hand where I can't draw anymore. Drawing is really a muscle that I need to be always working out. I could literally sit down today and draw something that changes the way people think, and that’s really the goal of anyone’s work, to have a deep lasting impact on people.
Tell me about the bipolar stuff. Tell me about how you deal with that and do you use it as a fuel or is it something that’s a hindrance?
It's definitely cleared up a lot of things for me. A lot of people don't know that there's bipolar one and bipolar two. The main difference between the two is with bipolar one you can have mania, which is so ramped up that you can have disregard for others and you can do dangerous things and hurt people. But it's much shorter and your mania is maybe crazier. Whereas bipolar two, you have mania but it's much less dangerous but then your depression is huge and it lasts a long time - months to years. When I was working at Wieden I had just been diagnosed but wasn’t on proper medication yet and I had this bout of mania. I had this new job, all these new opportunities and I just felt like I was on top of the world and nobody could stop me, I was having the most brilliant ideas. I think for people that are bipolar, there is kind of a love hate relationship with the disorder because when you're having a bout of mania, you can feel amazing. You can have all these ideas and if you look back in terms of history and notable people that have had bipolar - I think there's almost a usefulness of bipolar, it helps you do things that you normally wouldn't do and gives you courage. People with bipolar have done really amazing things, but then there's the other side of that where they end up killing themselves because the depression is really hard to go through. I think it's given me a lot more empathy when I see different people struggling, you don't know what people are struggling with. I think people are quick to judge others but bipolar has helped me to have more empathy.
Listen to Jason’s college playlist here.