avalove

About me:

purchase www.avalove.etsy.com poems www.ava-love.com stay tuned for www.avalovedesign.com interviews: How did you get into t-shirt design? A peacock feather, a Japanese gocco, an ex-boyfriend who knew how to make silkscreens at home, a new york sales tax id number, and a little table set up in soho, and a nervous creative tick that needs to be expressed. Where do you look to for inspiration? branches, bodies of water, fields of city flowers, birds and botanics, feathers of all shapes and sizes, nature, nature, and more nature. Poetry inspires the metaphor of the visual images so often the shirts tell stories. Like a drawing in a journal. Or a photograph in a photo album. Marks some kind of place in time in my history mapped out by image. What are you hoping to say with your line? I view my prints as works of art and my body of clothing as the canvas. Each print is considered a lithograph. With a master's in poetry, I self-publish my poetry on shirts. A poet's got to make a living somehow. Wink. I'm trying to take the typical bread and butter t-shirt print and make it into the unexpected, printing on more interesting bodies ready to wear and to make clothes into art we can hang in a gallery, every day objects like duvet covers and surfboards as things you hang in museums. I'm working on the idea of maintaining a business with a consciousness, whether it's making people happy and feel pretty and positive in my pieces, or creating awareness about a social or political issue, or helping someone be inspired to live their dream. It's a very small company, nothing is mass produced, everything is printed in Fort Greene in Brooklyn, and I maintain that it's hand-made, limited edition, made with heart, and a dream. Why should people buy handmade? Plain and simple, it's good for the earth. Buying handmade is buying with consciousness and promoting business with consciousness. Not only is it supporting small business, which hopefully is sweat-shop free, positive, happy, earth friendly environment-creating less waste then a large mass produced line, but also, supports someone's dream, and helps keep things person to person and personal. Handmade gear is a part of living the dream: the artist dreams when they make their work, and you buying it, helps support them to live their dream. It's a wonderful give and take. Each piece then means much more when the value and majic of the work is understood in this way. What does it mean to be an artist in New York? Does your location have a big influence on your work? Funny thing is: most of my work arrives from a botanical or natural source. I think because New York is so metal, cement, grounding: it often sends me daydreaming about woods, seawater, the desert in the southwest, and so these prints are almost dream prints from these daydreams. Advice? You can live your dream, whatever that is. It's up to you to create it and be brave enough to live, eat, and breathe it.