Our March - April Storefront Window artist is Q (John-Francis) Quiñonez
is a series of Mixed Media Paintings,
made alongside a series of Poems
all of the same title.
a current resident of the Dirt Palace,
Chef & Gm at Big Feeling Ice Cream,
Co-Guardian of Lost Bag,
Board member for Binch Press//Queer.Archive.Work,
and Desert Flower living + loving in Olneyville - Center of the Whole World.
You can find more info on the Artist & Their work at www.johnfrancisquinonez.com
All paintings are available for purchase direct from the Artist at johnfrquinonez@gmail.com
all made from the same Generative & Spiritual Constraints,
alongside inspiring Ephemera,
and including a collection of Risograph Prints
Below is a conversation between Storefront Window Artist/Poet Q (John-Francis) Quiñonez and artist Meredith Stern
Meredith Stern: How do you define yourself as a creator and artist? Are there certain adjectives that you are drawn to which describe your work and how you approach art making?
Q (John-Francis) Quiñonez: Oh gawd ~ hm. A thing that has been powerful in recent years is a newly felt & understood throughline between all my seemingly disparate practices. Between the painting, printmaking, writing, events coordinating, cooking - I never feel like I am putting down one practice by picking another up. I feel like they are all equally pulling from the same source, working with each other, and communicating with the same language which makes all the plate-spinning feel quite peaceful. From the outside I think that looks like…Heavily-Layered, Highly-Textured, Playful. I am always hoping to achieve some kind of Balance, but how I pursue that is more inline with Nature than it is a Product of Intent. I feel that Balance happens by relinquishing control to some extent. I seek to reward resistance (in design and in the relationship between materials), and not correct if things don’t line up perfectly. What tends to emerge is an overall balance of places to get drawn to, lose yourself in, and rest which I feel is Forest-like.
MS: I love the way you use dynamic color, texture, and layering in your pieces. Can you speak about the technical process of how you create layers in your collages? What materials are you working with- painting? Cut up prints?
MS: When you created this body of work, can you explain your generative and spiritual constraints?
Q: I have a list of general rules and values that I follow for all of my work. I won’t list them all here, but to name a couple: If One, then All the Others. Add Something, Take Something. What is most important to me in setting these restraints is that the relationship between my body and intuition is nourished. There are times where something in me really resists a rule I set, and that is ultimately the voice I am trying to reward. It has, in many ways, been healing to find this path back into my body and not overly cerebral. I spend so much of my working life in a constant game of Mental Tetris, and so it has been important practice for getting out of my own way when I am creating.
MS: What are some conscious or unconscious influences you have when making these images? Do you listen to music when you are creating? Does the poem you write run through your head as you are creating the paintings and risoprints?
Q: I love “showing my work” in this regard. I feel as if everything I am absorbing as I am making visual and written work deserves acknowledgement - I am thinking about and taking in music, movies, comics, etc enough that they feel more like active companions than direct influences. I made a playlist of some of what I was listening to that I will attach here. Shout out to the shows Primal & Black Books, the work of writers Oliver Baez Bendorf, Max Ritvo, Taylor Johnson, the films of Wim Wenders, the illustrations of Lane Smith, the collages of Ray Johnson. My full length collection of poems “Keep Your Little Lights Alive” is track-for-track after Kate Bush’s Hounds of love, and seeks to honor how the work we love ripples throughout our life. I think there’s a little pressure for creative folk to keep influences close to the vest, but that is not why I come to art.
MS: Working with both text and image, how do you balance the relationship between the two? Does one lead the other? Do you come up with them simultaneously?
Q: I feel like this shows up the most in my writing - but as it applies to creativity, I really do not compartmentalize. I take great great care to write more or less exactly how I speak, and therefore there is little distinction between the sometimes absurdity of the images I am communicating and the matter-of-factness of the voice in which I am sharing them. The same is true between creative outputs. I feel like they are all emerging from the same waters. I look at all of these manifestations as kind of one holistic expression, in that way. It’s hard for me to consider that lake, as only the water. I am as concerned with the silt, the creatures, the skies around it, the way I felt looking at it, the memory after - all at once.
MS: I love the paper piece with the writing, “I won’t wait to love you.” It has a gorgeous watercolor quality to it, and I also love your font, which creates a lovely contrast to the color layers. Did you make a font alphabet to use in your work, or do you hand draw each letter?
Q: I think this points back to the practice of Waste Mitigation. Sometimes I am working from a found or illustrated text, but almost always I am using and re-using and using and re-using to the point that I sometimes end up with several alphabets from the same source. I have a really hard time with the exactness of type work, and more so follow what textures move me.
Risograph prints from, i won’t wait to love you, Installation by Q (John-Francis) Quiñonez in the Dirt Palace Storefront Window Gallery
MS: What is your process for risograph- do you work intuitively and work on each layer as you go? Do you map out the entire piece and how all the layers will work together from the start?
Q: Entirely by hand, Entirely Scanned in, One Layer at a time, Each reacting to the former. I sometimes make edits in the final culmination for the sake of legibility, but really what I am looking for is the print to have movement and a life of its own whether that be as a book, or flier. Sometimes there is significantly more machineghost than me for this reason, but I do try to always learn or try something new with my print work. It was really through book & flier making that my relationship to visual art got reactivated for which I am deeply, deeply grateful.
MS: What artists influence you? Are there historical and contemporary artists or images that have shaped you as an artist? Do you see yourself as part of a contemporary movement of artists and/or activists?
Q: I think some of this was covered in a previous answer, and I’m not sure if I do see myself as part of a particular group of artists or activists.
I will say ~ creative community is always my guiding light. I wouldn’t be here, and certainly not here in Providence, without the direct inspiration and encouragement of the creative folk around me. Deep and endless gratitude to the folks at Provslam (Muggs Fogarty, Charlotte Abotsi, Chrysanthemum, Justice Ameer, and many exceptional others) for putting this city on my radar and being active collaborators that brought me here. Deep and endless gratitude to my co-guardians at Lost Bag Sam & Lids. Deep and endless gratitude to Alex, Tarik, and the team at Big Feeling Ice Cream. Deep and endless gratitude to Tycho, and the Binch Press/Queer.Archive.Work. membership and board. Deep and endless gratitude to fellow Artists Eli Nixon, and Adam Kelly, and many many others that I hold in my heart every day. I’ve been very lucky.
MS: What are you inspired by right now? What are you thinking about exploring next? Do you have plans for continuing to evolve this work, or perhaps changing gears into a new process?
Q: Going into 2027, I will be focusing more on Tour Booking & Managing and so I will likely be putting most of my creative energy into those collaborations, and entering a prolonged period of receiving the world and sharing through performance. I have been working with composer Bex Burch in support of a new piece of music she has been working on, and will be doing a good amount of traveling around that starting this Summer. My goal is for my next collection of Prints and Poems to exist as a kind of Talisman alongside a recorded album of Poetry with Musical Ensemble. I feel like some kind of powerful shift is emerging, and I am trying to make as much space for that as is possible.
Thank you!
Stay Sweet!
John-Francis Quiñonez (They/Them) is a Desert Flower & Current Resident of Providence, RI/ a Queer Writer & Multimedia Artist/ Maker of ice creams / Events Guardian/ Member of the Queer.Archive.Work. project & Binch Press/ has a collection of Poems with Write Bloody Publishing (‘22) entitled Keep Your Little Lights Alive (Poems After Kate Bush’s "Hounds of Love" & Others)/ is thinking a lot about Emerging.
Meredith Stern has a BFA in Ceramics from Tulane University. She is a founding member of the International printmaking group The Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. She has developed a multifaceted practice that includes printmaking, collage, and ‘zine publishing. She teaches in the Illustration Department at RISD. Her work is in the Library of Congress, the Obama Presidential Museum Collection, and the Book Arts Collection at MOMA. www.meredithstern.org @misstrouserpants
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