Today we’d like to introduce you to Jason Snape.
Hi Jason, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I have loved to draw, read, and write since my mom started taking me to the library and since my dad started bringing home discarded mimeographs so that I could draw on the back. I learned a great deal about humor from my favorite writers, artists, and cartoonists, and that continued throughout my life, shaping my visual language and storytelling.
All throughout school, even college, I tried to include something illustrated for any project, paper, or assignment. Those teachers affirmed my artistic self simply by being open to beyond-written content. I created cartoons for school papers and drew scenes to accompany book reports. In 5th grade, I re-interpreted The Emperor’s New Clothes, bound it by hand, and created a hard cover for it using leftover wallpaper from our family room. For social studies in high school, I created a 12-page newspaper called the Daily Pyramid, full of drawings and articles about the mundane and monumental doings of the ancient civilizations around the fertile crescent.
I went to college for architecture, but when I wasn’t accepted to that program, I found my way into design studies (a BA in environmental, graphic, interior, and product design). That was an excellent route for me to continue drawing, and reading, and discovering wonderful new ideas, artists, designers, and ways of doing. It was then that I began keeping hardbound sketchbooks to document my wanderings and wonderings (I’m now on book #33). Because a BA is a general degree, which suited my personality perfectly, my portfolio of work was all over the place after I graduated. So, I went to graduate school for graphic design, where I lost a bit of my humor and gained deeper conceptual skills. But I continued to do cartoons for the school magazine, and my thesis was on the role of humor in graphic design, so I recovered from that brief lapse of taking myself too seriously.
My design career was in three stages and has now entered a fourth. For nine years, I worked at a wide variety of design firms and corporate entities as a graphic designer, spanning the from pre-internet to the dot-bomb years. Stage two began when my son was born, followed by my daughter, and I stayed home to raise them for five years while my wife Sue kept the job that carried our insurance and security. That was a wonderful, transformational time for me. My sketchbook drawings began a life beyond the page, becoming teeshirts and prints and launching my long-cherished dreams of developing my own children’s books, all of which have continued for these last 20 years. Stage three began when I tentatively reached out to the nearby university to speak to their art department about what teaching was like. I was hired on the spot for the semester, which began a few weeks later. Simultaneously, my wife found it necessary to transition her career and went back to school for Culinary, so now I carry the insurance and the security.
Stage four appeared only a couple of years ago when I resigned from teaching after ten years of full-time work as a Senior Lecturer and graphic design coordinator. So far, stage four is about simplifying. With our children off to college, we moved to a 1,000 sf house and an outbuilding for my studio. My commute went from 45-90 minutes to ten. My take-home mental workload went from lots and lots to zero.
Right now, my focus is on developing my artwork for my online shop, for festivals, for galleries, and for books and other projects. For the first time in my life, I have been able to keep that effort consistent. I have become a better illustrator and have discovered new themes, ideas, and ways of making. I have recaptured my delight in drawing (even though I’ve still been drawing all along). I feel like I’m on the cusp, in the midst of transformation, and it is a good energy. My mantras through the challenges of teaching, the pandemic, and creative frustrations have been:
Thank you for the ability to change.
Thank you for the ability to use my gifts and share them.
Thank you; no one can prevent me from creating my art.
Today is a great day.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Consistently, what has been a ‘no’ in my life has always redirected me into something that proved to be a fulfilling, different discovery. Not getting into an architecture program exposed me to graphic design. Not finding employment for months after graduate school carried me all the way to Atlanta in my search, which became my home. (And that happened because, in my frustration, I designed a mailer that was true to my humor and voice rather than trying to impress my peers and the design world with how ‘cool’ my designs could be.)
A designer rarely worked at one studio for decades, but regular changes to my employment led me to become comfortable and adept at interviewing and introduced me to great creative people all around Atlanta. It also added a wonderfully wide variety of design work to my portfolio.
Teaching took me years to become good at. I overcame unrealistic expectations for both myself and my students, finding a balance between challenging and insurmountable. I learned to teach in my own way and grew to be better as a teacher than almost anything else I had done. So, it was particularly hard when I realized that I had hit a mental and emotional wall and could no longer continue.
The most persistent struggle has been with my hopes to become a children’s book creator. There have been the usual rejections of ideas, but the greater barrier has been my own wavering confidence in myself and maintaining the clarity and focus needed to craft a story well. The evolution, growth, and improvement in my art/illustration business since 2020 have been encouraging and helped me establish better practices.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I consider my art to be my work, even though I don’t like to call it work. During the years I spent at home with my children, my sketchbook drawings started to become prints that people were interested in buying. That was when I came to recognize that THIS was why I am here. My art is what I am here to do, and it nourishes me enormously. So much of what I have done at my jobs were things that anyone could do; this is something that only I can do. I’m the expert.
My business is Snape’s Ridiculorum. I create whimsical, sometimes child-oriented, sometimes nerdy, colorful illustrations. They are not cartoons; they are not paintings. I don’t like when they’re called cute. But they are quiet and have a gentle humor. They are simple, but within them lives some small story that may be whispering. The most interesting thing I’ve learned about my drawings is that I don’t always know where they come from. Unlike graphic design, I don’t feel obligated to try to explain or understand what it’s all about. What flows out of my pencil or pen can have its own logic and story. It can turn into something substantial (like my chess problems series) or remains some odd joke that I don’t even understand (an enormous man in overalls, carrying a shuffleboard stick, with the caption ‘Summer of the Bear, 1949’).
But after a psychologist asked me about the meaning of one of my prints, I started enjoying writing a little story about each one. They are poems or a few sentences and don’t explain it so much as give it some context. They have also helped me practice storytelling.
These tiny stories are what sets my art apart from others, as well as the mix of loose linework, cheerful colors, and a sort of seriousness about the humor. I delight in the nonsense that’s being taken seriously, like in Winnie-the-Pooh, Edward Gorey, or Catch-22, where the logic is delightfully ridiculous to us but often invisible to the characters. I also love crafted (not random) incongruity, as done in Monty Python, Calvin and Hobbs, Shaun Tan, and the Coen Brothers films.
I have not been good at maintaining confidence in my craft or in myself as an artist. But I have been proud of almost all of my illustrations. Every piece of Nonsense that transformed from my sketchbook into a print still makes me smile, even though some are still not fully resolved. I have had a succession of exciting pieces of the last few years – a Pig Aviation annotated diagram, a set of 12 Chess Problems, my Oz series, and my Doubt series. I’ve been proud of myself for being brave enough to submit my work to gallery shows and juried reviews, and delighted when they’ve been accepted. Anything that helps my Nonsense go out into the world feels successful. My tagline is Give Nonsense a Good Home.
What are your plans for the future?
Because I’ve been able to maintain creative momentum over the last two years, I’ve been attending more and more festivals, reaching out to more galleries, and made more (and more interesting) art. Because I finally (after 20 years) got a business license and formalized my endeavors, my self-perception has changed from casual to much more professional. I have dusted off old book manuscripts to revisit. I have been more persistent for longer stretches of time, so now I have three book concepts that I’m working on and moving them toward self-publication if no one in publishing sees promise.
I’m very excited about new festivals I’ve applied for (in particular, the Decatur Arts Festival) and new ones on the horizon that I’ve been accepted to (Goblin Winter Market, Marietta the Gathering). I would love to get into the American Library Association conference or any sort of book festival; I think those are my people. I would love to get into new gallery shows outside Georgia, where Nonsense might also get a warm reception.
There are three big changes that I hope for in the coming year. However, they are dependent on the confidence of the Ridiculorum’s Financial Department.
One: a four-day work week, leaving every Friday fully committed to art.
Two: a 3-7 day seasonal creative retreat, whereby I go off into the woods to some remote, quiet location, surrounded by nature, and focus fully on my art. I did this once in 2018, for nine days, and it was a fantastic, productive, meditative experience.
Three: to finish my three books, even if they are printed only for myself and my friends. I need to do this so I can move on to subsequent book projects. These ideas have been in production for a long, long time, and I need to let them go.
Pricing:
- 9×12 prints $45-50
- 13×19 prints $75
- 15×36 limited edition giclees $400-500
- 5×7 or smaller tiny framed prints $25-35
- 11×14 story-spread prints $60
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jasonsnape.com, www.pigaviation.net
- Instagram: @ridiculorum, @pigaviation
