Life & Work with Ashlin Fletcher of Laguna Beach

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashlin Fletcher.

Hi Ashlin, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Not to sound dramatic but I feel like I came out of my mother with this loud and stubborn need to be making something, constantly. It was one of the only things I’ve consistently been strong-willed about. Both of my parents are pretty bizarre and creative people and couldn’t have cared less about my siblings and I doing sports or after school programs, but they were deeply encouraging of us being creative. Before I was old enough to go to school my dad would help my brother and I create stop motion movies and I would sculpt and make collages with my mom. She was the type of woman to pull us out of school just to go on a hunt for a giant hand-shaped chair or Mexican jumping beans, so I am innately this way but my parents definitely nourished my wormy little art brain as well. My practice came to me especially as a teenage act of rebellion against school, mental illness, coming of age, and overall discontentment/itchiness with the state of the world. I spent every class drawing instead of doing my work. I’d draw caricatures of the teachers I resented in the blank spaces of standardized test questions which I pretty much never had the answers for. It felt like the only power I had. Of course my grades suffered immensely because of this, (and I was treated like an absolute muppet by everyone except my art teachers.) but I found myself learning the most about art this way. When I was fifteen, stuck in after school detention my math teacher sat me down and asked me what I planned on doing with my life. I told him the same thing I told everyone else, that I was going to be an artist. He told me that I should do anything but become an artist, that I would have an unstable financial life, that I wasn’t ambitious enough, that I would grow to hate art. I heard the same thing from nearly every adult, except hearing it from him had felt so different, he had said it with such deep personal disdain. Everyone knew that this teacher had once planned on becoming a professional football player, but he got injured, and was now a bitter high school algebra teacher. I knew I had to do everything in my power to prove him and everyone else wrong, even if I failed at it.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It’s been a fairly challenging road, but even if the obstacles haven’t helped me, they’ve helped my artistic practice. Right before I turned fourteen I started taking one-on-one art lessons every week for a year with this weird old man. He was charismatic and charming and my parents trusted him. My mom would drop me off at his apartment in a retirement home like eight blocks from where we lived, and he would make me draw circles for an hour. There was usually another old person in the apartment to keep watch so nothing “sketchy” would happen, but that other old person was usually decrepit or in a borderline vegetative state and was kept in the other room. Every week my teacher would slowly cross boundaries with me until I was just getting molested on the regular. I didn’t really know if it was molestation or not at the time, it felt like a really horrible thing to think of someone that my parents liked and trusted but looking back it 100% was. Around that time I fell into a pretty hefty depressive episode. I began experiencing daily panic attacks, struggled to muster up an appetite, and was getting sick regularly. It felt like my own body was rejecting me. But it wasn’t until I began having really vivid and bizarre nightmares that I eventually realized the gravity of the situation. I can confidently say that I have grappled with this part of my life and I no longer feel actively hurt by it, but it definitely changed my relationship to art for some time. But those nightmares I had gave me what felt like an infinite amount of material for my drawings and paintings, and with isolation and my compulsion to fill up sketchbooks I kind of pulled myself out of the mental trench I had been stuck in.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m an illustrator and a printmaker. When I have access to a printing press or silk screen I love making reductive prints, but for the past couple of years my main focus has been making watercolor paintings. I have this love/hate relationship with our current trashy, pornographic, hedonistic, and borderline dystopian country and my body of work feels like my own version of a satirical response to it, but I also love making art about nostalgia, ghosts, death/decay, and things I regularly have dreams about. I really do love the direction I’m headed in with my art, but I still have so much to grow and improve on with my technical abilities. I just hope I’m around long enough to bring all of my ideas to the fullest of their fruition.

Any big plans?
I don’t have any specific plans beyond finishing my illustration degree and ending up in any position where I am getting paid to create. Even though the world is in a pretty dark and seemingly hopeless place, I am going to remain ruthlessly optimistic and excited for the future, even if I end up being totally wrong for it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fleshchair.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashlinfleshchair

Image Credits
Ashlin Fletcher