Today we’d like to introduce you to Winston Fulbright.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I never considered myself an artist. As a kid I absolutely hated arts and crafts. Nothings sounded worse to me than having to color or cut and paste some stuff together. I hated it. I did though like being with my friends and creating things. I would draw silly monster comic books with my best friend and then make copies and try to sell them in school for 25 cents. I hated making art but I loved my art teachers. I remember being in a 7th grade art class despising the project but my art teacher would just talk music with me. I was very into music as a young kid. I was completely utterly obsessed with the guitar and guitar-based music from blues to metal and everything in between. This art teacher would play the Grateful Dead and Black Sabbath while we worked in her class and would make it so enjoyable to me.
Around this time I had started to get deeply into anime and manga and would find myself drawing and tracing characters. I was never good at it but it got me looking and learning some various techniques. At the same time, I was also playing music with other people for the first time and starting my first small garage bands. We would play music and after I’d come home and draw various album covers for us. I was also a member of the school’s orchestra and enjoyed playing guitar and bass very much. I played music and that took my main focus for a few years. I’d still draw album covers and doodle in school but it was not something I put much focus on. I did however get into working with electronics and circuit bending. I learned to make home made contact mics with piezo conductors and began experimenting with various speakers and amplifiers.
I became fascinated with making music and recording it and applying visuals on top of it. I remember my early high school punk bands; projectors and the visual aspect played a huge roll in the performance. I would play small venues constantly from Seven Venue, Swayzes, The Warehouse, The Triangle, the Agape, The Masquerade and many more small venues and homes that I cannot remember the name of anymore. At these shows I would often bring out modded effect pedals that I would rehouse in pickle jars and various other strange containers and make crazy oscillations and sounds while having random video footage projected on us. Wanting to be very much a modern Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth. This led me meeting, making friends with and working with a lot of musicians.
When I turned 18 I got into working local crew for large productions at Philips Arena, Lakewood and Verizon amphitheaters.
This allowed me to meet many high-level professionals in the industry and showed me what it took to put on a show at the upper levels of entertainment. That summer I decided I wanted to go to school for film and after visiting a few different schools I found myself enrolled at SCAD-Atlanta. I loved SCAD and made many friends. It was an extremely intimidating yet freeing environment. As someone who was not really a fan of doing traditional art and being thrown into drawing classes with photo realism drawers really puts you outside of your comfort zone but I enjoyed it and found my personal creativity and skills improving every class I took. I did however begin to change my goals. I found working in film became too reliant on others and would often get frustrated having to wait on others to get projects done. I had become sort of lost in what I wanted to do. At the time I was halfway through SCAD and had finished all my foundation classes and had taken a few films and writing classes. I knew I wanted to create but I was unsure what I wanted to create anymore and I knew working in film at the time was not for me.
In the summer of 2013 I became convinced I needed to return to my love of instruments and music. I dropped out of SCAD. I researched and found the oldest longest running school of Luthiery (the art of building instruments), Roberto-Venn in Phoenix Arizona. I moved without ever going to the Midwest/ west coast before. I knew no one and looked at it as a fresh start. During this time, I learned how to make and repair electric and acoustic guitars, violins and classical string instruments, and amplifiers. During this time, I also brought a DSLR camera with me and found myself taking more and more photographs. I had taken a basic photography class in college but it was more for fun than anything else but now I was taking pictures of people’s instruments and the scenery around Phoenix. After graduating Roberto-Venn I returned to Atlanta and while working as a guitar tech I started taking classes again at SCAD-Atlanta. This time my focus was on completing my near finished writing degree and photography. I moved to Savannah from Atlanta to go to the school’s main campus and found myself photographing more and more.
When I was down in Savannah I become better and better with every class and saw large leaps in my progression in skills as an artist. I became focused on product, fashion, and portrait photography. I became obsessed with mastering studio lights and strobes.
The scale of my projects started getting bigger. I got deeply into exploring abandoned spaces. With the discovery that you can rent generators from home depot for $40 I would start bringing the studio lights with me to these abandoned factories and buildings and would do full studio style shoots in these spaces. I also started to experimenting with glitch art and how to cause a photograph to glitch by manipulating its code in various ways. During this I discovered you could trick a photograph into being read as an audio file through a digital audio workstation such as Pro Tools. This allowed me to add music effects such as distortion, delay and reverbs to photographs and they would cause interesting ways of glitching the photograph. I pushed this technique and discovered I could send the out signal of the photograph made into sound to my analogue guitar pedal board then back into my computer, reassemble it into a photograph once more and would get these really cool and relatively controllable images. This got the interest of a good number of my professors and with their help some galleries. I began to also get into the old-style Large Format photography but I would then apply my sound glitching technique to the film after I had scanned in the negatives.
It is my modern take on alternative processing. I graduated SCAD in the Fall of 2016 and found myself in countless interviews with various companies for a wide variety of rolls. From add firms to instrument companies and everything in between. I eventually found myself being hired by JSI SIGNS. This roll brought me into the world of sign and t-shirt making. I started as being responsible to show off the products the company sold by making as many demo T shirts and stickers as I possibly can come up with. The job has been wonderful for freely allowing me to create whatever I want and refocused my art onto two mediums, T shirts and Stickers. I still am booked heavily for freelance photography usually it is for fashion or product photography. But from 8-5 I have an office and studio I get to go to everyday and semi freely create. On the job I have become very good at UX and web design and have found my rolls in the company heavily expanded into a more administrative roll but still afforded the freedom to create. Currently I am working on a launch of a clothing line for this fall.
Please tell us about your art.
My main work these days is Clothing Design, Photography and Graphic Design. I mainly shoot using a Cannon 5D Mark 4 and various lenses and strobes. Sometimes I’ll pull the Lieca 35mm or Toyo 4×5 out. I heavily use Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, After Effects, Pro Tools, Motion, Audacity, and Flexi Sign for my work. I don’t really create art with a message anymore. If I do it’s not anything deeper then I think it looks cool. I very much so think of the art I create as I creating a product to sell. I’m not going to create anything that I think is meant to have great meaning even when others think there is. I used to do political work and documentary photography but I found no one cared till I just started on focusing on just making things that look cool.
Aesthetically pleasing art seems to get much more attention than anything I’ve done with meaning and a story behind it. Only thing I want people to understand about my work is how large some of the productions tend to get. Sometimes the whole scale and the staff I have helping behind the scenes of what I am shooting can be very impressive and it is a fun environment. I love running a photo set with a whole team helping with my cables, lighting, makeup, styling and talent. It almost a big fun party with friends.
Given everything that is going on in the world today, do you think the role of artists has changed? How do local, national or international events and issues affect your art?
I think my role as an artist is really the roll of a creator. As our world advances and technology becomes more integral part of our lives we are going to see the want for jobs that require talent and artistic skills rise. To take a photograph takes an eye and no matter how great artificial intelligence and technology gets they will not be able to have the same eyes, hand, and mind as those an artist possesses. As an artist my job is to create items that others would want to purchase or use.
I also think to many artists feel like they have to do protest art during these times and while I have participated in creating art such as that I find that it is heavily the artist responsibility to fully research what they are protesting and understand the full implications of what they create and are saying. Some will base their whole mind set off of some internet articles they read off social media with no true research. Being able to do your own research and think for yourself and fully explore things is deeply missing in most people’s protest art. This leads to a muddying of the message they are trying to project and allows those who oppose their views to easily attack them. I can all day make a stuff that is anti-Trump or whatever politician is despised at the time but if as an artist you cannot explain why their policies are bad from more than the position of you don’t like them or they are rude then I have a hard time supporting that work. If you are going to create work with meaning you better understand fully what all your putting behind it.
Local events influence my art in the way that Atlanta culture tends to influence my style and aesthetic. I tend to rely heavily on models that are people of color and I feel that is based highly off of the people I surround myself with.
National Events allow me to create works that play off of current events to help market my work. International events effects my work because they can cause difference in prices on the materials I use to create my art. Even weather can affect the price of my materials so any event has the potential to influence and change what I am working on just from a budgeting stand point.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
www.winstonfulbright.com is the best place to catch my work. I also keep a very active Instagram account. My current name is rutherfordbhayes_at_gmail but I tend to change my Instagram name once a month. If you search Winston Fulbright I will pop up though. Currently I am not showing in any galleries or art shows but have lots of plans and been in talks for this upcoming fall and winter. You can see lots of my work at your local mall or various clothing store but due to some NDA’s I can’t really say which brands but if you go through my Instagram you can put two and two together.
My clothing brand is called Bad Nutrition Clothing. Website is under construction and is not live currently but will be this October at www.badnutritionclothingco.com. I do small batch custom clothing and stickers biweekly sold through my Instagram that sell out very quickly. If you would like to support me hire me for a shoot.
Contact Info:
- Address: Midtown, Atlanta, Georgia, United States, Earth
- Website: www.winstonfulbright.com
- Email: wfulbright@me.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rutherfordbhayes_at_gmail
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WinstonFulbright
Image Credit:
All Photos Shot, Lit, Edited, and Styled by Winston Fulbright. I also made that leather face shirt.
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