Cara Thayer - Panorama City, California, USA
Louie Van Patten - West Des Moines, Iowa, USA

 

Cara Thayer e Louie Van Patten: I grew up in West Des Moines and Cara grew up in Bend, Oregon.
We met when Cara was going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Our collaboration started with me essentially working as an assistant for Cara's large-scale projects at school. To continue our collaboration, I had to learn the fundamentals of painting, so I studied in Oregon with some extra mentoring from Cara. Since 2007, we
have worked exclusively as collaborative artists. We feel that we are better artists together than we would be separate, but that is sort of a non-point as we are essentially making that statement unprovable by not making art separately.

Black Cat: Hi Yannick, please introduce yourself….
Yannick Bouchard:   Well, I'm 29 years old, and I have been a full-time artist/freelance illustrator for a year now. As probably most artists, I've always drawn since as far back as I can remember, and even at a very early age, I've always knew that I wanted to be an artist when I'd grow up. I was really into comic books when I was a kid, and it's only around the age of 18 or 19 that I got interested in painting.

Name : Lauren K. Cannon (aka Navate)
Place of birth: New Jersey, USA

BC: Hi Lauren, please, tell me something about you....about your personality and your daily life.
LKC: I’m a total hermit.  Very introverted.  I don’t understand people who need to talk to their friends every day.  I also live in my head constantly.  As a teen, I guess all the other girls were busy thinking about boys but I was thinking about strange lands and impossible creatures.  My fashion sense is pretty dark and eclectic, and I have a herd of cats.  I graduated college a few years ago and now I work from home.

Black Cat:    Please give us a brief bio, where you are from and how you started in this field?
Patricia Ariel:   I am originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I have always been into the arts, not only visual, but also performing arts and even music. I have an academic background in Arts and had some formal training in drawing, but never took it too seriously to the point of making a career out of it – well, maybe when I was a kid. But when I came to US, in 2005, I saw myself in a sort of limiting situation regarding to communication, since my spoken English was not great and I could not do any of the things I used to do in my country, like teaching or acting.

Place of birth: White Plains NY

 

B.C.:     Please give us a brief bio, where you are from and how you started in this field?
M.G.:     I’m a third generation artist , both my Grandfather and My Father, were  artistic,  and now my Mother started painting too at age 70, but I am the first to  pursue it as a living, and way of life. I grew up in a suburb about 50 miles from  NYC., so thanks to frequent visits with my parents ,  this most incredible city  became a familiar resource for me from the beginning.

Black Cat:   Hi Markus, for the beginning can you, please, tell me what attracted you toward art and when did you discover your talent?
Markus Vogt:  Painting or all other sorts of creative work was always one of my main preferences since my childhood. I do no more know if there was a specific reason for this or anything else which attracted me to art. Everybody has certain strengths and weaks and i realized very early that my strenghts would be more towards the creative things and less towards the pure technical way of thinking.