Art & Life with Niv Bavarsky

Today we’d like to introduce you to Niv Bavarsky.

Niv, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in a Jewish immigrant family, immigrating from Israel in the early 90s. I was just a toddler when we came to the US, but my older brother Dory had already established his identity as a piano player, and his creative life in many ways set the tone for mine, both as a role model and as something to (gently) rebel against.

Seeing his hard work towards a creative practice inspired me to dive into my own, and I began drawing obsessively at a very young age, no doubt in part to try and keep up somehow with a prodigiously talented older brother, but also because I just loved drawing, and I loved images, and I would spend untold hours looking at books of paintings my mom had, going to museums, watching cartoons, reading comics, copying John Tenniel illustrations, Picasso, Ninja Turtles, anything. As a pre-teen, I became very interested in music as well, but I didn’t have the patience for the kind of classical training my brother was already advanced in, so I took up guitar and tried to make the strangest music I could with computers and electronics, becoming deeply enamored with jazz, hip hop, krautrock, prog rock, and electronic music.

Later, I went to art school in Baltimore and studied to become an illustrator, while always keeping a musical practice going. Now I’m 30 years old, and both visual art and music both remain central to my life and work. I live in Los Angeles, working as a freelance illustrator for publication and animation, maintain a personal fine art practice, record music, and have recently dived into scoring projects for animation.

Can you give our readers some background on your art?
Professionally, I work as an illustrator, primarily for editorial publications, such as the New York Times, New Yorker, The Atlantic, WIRED, etc. but also for animation projects, album covers, and recently some forays into virtual reality.

Privately, I make drawings and paintings, and work extensively in sketchbooks, both for observational drawing and stream of consciousness experiments. I also have done quite a bit of collaborative visual work with my dear friends and very special artists Michael Olivo & Jesse Balmer. Michael Olivo and I have recently finished a graphic novel (which we wrote and draw entirely together), which should see publication in late 2019. I also oversee all design for Full Color Sound Records, my brother Dory’s record label that houses his many musical alter egos.

I release music under the name Youngest Brother (an inside joke with Dory but also an homage to his impact on my creative life), and have made scores for animated shorts and videogames, as well as music for an upcoming Cartoon Network virtual reality project.

I don’t have necessarily have a specific message in my work, but my inspirations are many, and I believe that through creative work I come to know myself & the world. I love the community that creativity can provide, and I treasure my relationships with other artists and musicians. I love being obsessed with things, constantly trying to improve myself and deepen my relationship with the work, learning new things and widening the parameters of what I do. In a sense it’s all a meditation for me, a way of channeling something, a way of growing and connecting.

How do you think about success, as an artist, and what do quality do you feel is most helpful?
To me success is evolution and growth, and also a sense that I’m having a genuine conversation with the work I admire most. There are also of course the realities of making a living as an artist, and things that help pay the bills can be successes, but there’s a separate kind of “creative success” I’m always chasing that can be very elusive, frustrating, totally crazy-making, and completely personal, and a chase I hope doesn’t end.

What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
My illustration portfolio is at http://www.nivbavarsky.com and I post more personal work and experiments on Instagram and other social media as @navbars – for music, you can find my work on Spotify, iTunes, etc. under the name Youngest Brother – in August I released an EP called “Bad Math”, and have a full length album upcoming in early 2019. You can also purchase directly through https://youngestbrother.bandcamp.com – the graphic novel Michael Olive and I recently finished will be published in 2019 as well, and some kind of full announcement will be forthcoming for that.

Contact Info:

• Website: nivbavarsky.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/nivbavarsky
• Twitter: twitter.com/nivbavarsky
• Other: youngestbrother.bandcamp.com

Image Credit:
Niv Bavarsky

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