Jeff Soto
"I started thinking about how I live my life, about my parents, my grandparents, and how we're all going to die."
Jeff Soto is contemplating life. It's what happens when you become a dad, right? You think about things - your past, their future, the whole circle of life - and if you're talented like Soto, those existential thoughts become incredible works of art.
Two months after the birth of his second daughter, the Californian artist has found himself facing a trio of firsts: first time in London, for his first international solo show, painting a street piece for the first time in ten years. His show - The Inland Empire - has gone down a right royal storm and, judging by the little red dots on almost every piece, pretty much everything has sold. So c'mon, Jeff - why so morbid?
"Bringing a kid into the world, at least for me, was pretty serious stuff," says the thirty-nine-year-old, taking a break from the giant wall he's working on. "And when we had our first daughter, I started thinking about the way we lived our lives as a family, about the world, the future, environmental issues and the wars that were going on - kinda like all the horrible shit that was happening on the planet. I think that's when my work started to get a little darker."
A stalwart of the underground American art scene, Soto has seen his work thrown into a multitude of boxes: ‘lowbrow', ‘pop surrealism', and the all-too-familiar, media-friendly ‘urban art'. But, as an illustrator-turned-artist who grew up tagging drainage ditches as a suburban teen, where does Soto feel he fits in? "Aesthetically I understand urban art and what's going through these guys' heads when they're painting illegally, because I did that for so long," he says. "But I also understand pop surrealism, because that's coming from an illustration background. Everyone tries to categorise everything - that's what we do as humans, we put things into categories. I tend to want to call it contemporary art, because sometimes I'm caught in the middle and don't know where I belong."
If there's one place Jeff is sure he does belong, it's Riverside, California - a low-income area east of Los Angeles, also known as the Inland Empire. "It's kind of a weird place," says Soto, "a lot of poor people, very conservative people, lots of gangs and drugs - but it's also not that bad of a place. Why do I still live there? I don't know. It's my roots."
If the paintings here today are anything to go by, Soto's existential moment was something of a blessing. Toted as a "politically charged" show, The Inland Empire seems caught somewhere between despair and hope. There are Soto's signature creatures - sci-fi critters with puppy-cute eyes - but there's also war, pollution and our self-inflicted economic mess.
"Everything comes back to where you live," explains Jeff, "and right now my area is being hit hard by the recession. But it's also about nostalgia from when I was little. I used to think things were so simple when I grew up, but then there was the Vietnam War, the recession in the nineties... every generation has the terrible things they remember. So I started thinking about this crazy life cycle thing - we're cute little babies, we grow up into bratty teenagers, we go on to have kids and then we die and our kids take over from where we left off and it never ends."
Heavy stuff, Soto - so can we walk away from this with any hope? "It's bittersweet, I guess, but of course there's hope," he says. "Every generation has their great point in time - something important that's happening. And right now, I can't leave London without buying my daughter a Peppa Pig doll. She's crazy about that pig!"
The original article features in HUCK#015, out now.
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