Today we’d like to introduce you to Leonora Diwas.
Hi Leonora, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I struggle with the practical delineations between fact and fantasy. I suppose coming from Colonia Tovar in Venezuela has a lot to do with this. If you’ve never been there, just try to imagine a German village plopped, like an olive in a latte, into the heart of South America. I grew up on Bavarian pretzels, Black Forest Cake, and weak, tangy pilsners. My Spanish is filled with saucy idioms from our Baden dialect. My mother made churros with raisins and almonds. I am a surrealist by necessity.
When I was sixteen, I ran away from home and joined an itinerant band of street swindlers. Our specialty was a game called “cartas equivocadas,” a slightly more nuanced form of three-card monte. We’d go from city to city, setting up our little tables robbing the poor. In February of 2001, our “look-out” – the person delegated to keep an eye out for the authorities – was arrested. He was taken to the local police station and was beaten so badly he died in his cell from a cerebral hemorrhage. The next day, I was on a bus to Caracas and from there to Madrid to live with my Aunt Rosa.
Rosa – God rest her beautiful soul – was a weaver, and she encouraged me to go to art school. I enrolled at RABASF (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando), but I never got past the Foundation studies. I was always good at drawing but always bad at regimentation. The one fortuitous episode in my short tenure as an art student was my meeting of the French artist Currado Malaspina, who was a guest lecturer at the time. He offered me a job as a studio assistant, and I ended up moving to Paris and staying there until the French refused to renew my visa.
I think that my history as a young grifter has been formative. Malaspina taught me how to leverage my propensity toward intrigue and subterfuge into an art “career.” When I moved to Los Angeles in 2009, I was ready for a complete reinvention. It is to my unique origin that I owe the incredible and improbable success of Dead Poets Hard Wear.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Well, to be honest, Los Angeles wasn’t very hospitable at first. I had trouble finding an affordable place to live. I spent my first few years living on people’s sofas, subletting leaky guesthouses, and working as an au pair for obnoxious families with obnoxious children. In those days, my English wasn’t great, so I found myself communicating by drawing on yellow Post-its. It turned out that my drawings were much more interesting than my thoughts. One day, at Amoeba Records, I drew a quick caricature of Dean Martin, hoping to find some vintage Rat Pack cassettes. As luck would have it, standing next to me and looking over my shoulder was the abstract painter Dahlia Danton! Now, Dahlia is a Los Angeles institution. She knows EVERYONE. We hit it off right away, and she encouraged me to create a line of T-shirts with my sketches on them. The rest is history.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Dead Poets Hard Wear is a line of t-shirts emblazoned with, unsurprisingly, images of famous dead poets. From Homer and Sappho to Ginsberg and Bukowski, we run the literary gamut. It’s truly funny, but even though poetry readers are about as common as Costa Rican war heroes, our shirts are wildly successful. I think folks enjoy looking intelligent without having to do the grunt work of prosodic comprehension. You’d be amazed at how many Philip Larkin and Aimé Césaire shirts we’ve sold.
And speaking of Yiddish, another language that has been prematurely eulogized is Jazz. What I’m really proud of is our new dead jazz musician series of t’s. They’re really flying off the shelves. I just had an order the other day for 300 Eric Dolphy’s for the gift shop at the National Museum of Hip-Hop in Tbilisi. It is the most comprehensive museum devoted to music in the Caucasus, so I’m super excited!
How can people work with you, collaborate with you, or support you?
We welcome any and all forms of backseat driving and unsolicited critiques. It all gets thrown in the soup. That’s how creativity thrives.
Contact Info:
- Website: deadpoetshardwear.com
- Instagram: @deadpoetshirts
