Thomas Pool: What can you tell us about your practice? How did you come to be an illustrator, and what motivates your work?
Conor Nolan: I wasn’t actually always interested in illustration, but I’ve been doing it since finishing college in 2016. When I was leaving school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do and didn’t have a portfolio together or anything so I ended up doing a portfolio course for a year. It was a great course but I was really scatter-brained when I was younger and ended up just scraping into NCAD by the skin of my teeth. I think the feeling that I had barely got in made me feel like I had to work extra hard to catch up and in my first year, I got really into a bunch of different things, including sculpture and analogue photography. I was on the path to studying media or sculpture and even made a full black and white photobook in a darkroom at one point for an assignment. But for a later project in second year of college, we had to do illustration as part of the brief and it just kind of stuck with me from there.
Illustration for me has been something very closely linked with printmaking and other processes, and I think continuing to be curious about different processes has kept me motivated. I feel like if you’re trying to figure out a new process like, painting on a vase or making something out of clay, the engagement with the process and trying to figure it out kind of stops me from thinking too much about the imagery or trying to make it too perfect, which it will never be. I’ve just been trying to keep learning all the time.
TP: Your work’s distinct use of bold, angular shapes with bright colour palettes catch the eye in print shops, or when walking along George’s Street or past The Bernard Shaw Pub. How has your style evolved over the years?
CN: I ended up studying Visual Communications in college, which at the time in NCAD was a catch-all term for what was mainly a graphic design course where students were free to explore other areas like illustration, moving image, and photography. I think this base in graphic design, and the insight I got into how design fits into a commercial context, really helped me figure out what I was doing.
As I was trying to establish a style, I was learning to break things down into their basic shapes and components and build them back up. Then I was very interested in old screen-printed posters and generally influenced by tactile printed media that felt very tangible and accessible, as if you could see the processes in the output, which helped to shape my approach to colour and texture.
When I first started this process, I was largely focussed on how I would draw people and characters, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make people who felt realistic. Not in the photorealistic sense, but in the sense that they could exist in a world and I could then use the visual rules of the people – their proportions, colours, textures – to decide what the rest of that world looked like. More recently, I’ve loosened up a bit and tried to take each brief on its own and see how I can make people and things fit into a space in such a way that it fulfils the brief. It’s a slightly looser approach but one that I think is more challenging, less repetitive, less predictable. Also continuing to experiment with more processes has informed things in a similar way.
TP: Your work as an illustrator has led to the creation of many unique items of clothing, such as jumpers, t-shirts, hats and scarves, as well as cards, tote bags, chocolate boxes, flags, blankets, and even an action figure. How do you view the intersection of craft and illustration?
CN: There are a lot of reasons I do this. I do have a habit of looking at different objects/ outputs/ applications that I haven’t previously used, and wondering how the work I do would feel in that context. The processes involved in making the artwork very much takes the weight of the decision making, and does a lot to hold my attention, which can be a bit scattered. For example, if the process doesn’t allow me to add halftones to an image, I’ll do without them. If I’m painting a 3D object and only one side of it is visible at a time, I try to make an image that will work when only that side is visible, and so on.
On another level, I think it’s nice to make things that people can hold and use. For me, it’s a nice way of connecting with people beyond them just seeing the work on a screen. On the more individual items, like a hand-painted skateboard or an action figure, I think the process is very much visible and, like I said, I’m really drawn to where the methods have an impact on the appearance of the final product.
TP: You’ve previously worked with Irish and international clients such as Facebook and Jameson. As many other companies start to use AI for cheaper marketing alternatives, how are you viewing the future of commissioned design and illustration?
CN: There are a few issues I have with it really. One is the situation where an artist or illustrator is losing out on work because AI is being used, and the other is that this AI software is being trained by scraping libraries of work made by actual people, and then regurgitating that to make new images. I think a lot of AI art is just bad, even if it does get past the issue of people having weird hands and extra arms. There is no original thought behind it and all it’s able to do, at this point, is reshuffle the information it already has. As a result, the quality is poor, the imagery is not considered, and if companies use it, they’re sending the message that they don’t care about quality, and they’re getting a worse product too. Recently I was listening to a podcast where one of the two co-hosts suggested asking ChatGPT to fact-check a slightly complex question that came up, and the other co-host shot it down by saying “I think you’ll probably get a vague, generic answer that may or may not be true”. That’s the same level of quality that’s coming with the visual side of things.
On the second issue, it’s not exactly a new problem. Artists are always having their work copied by others and I think the best way to combat that is to make work that’s harder to copy. It’s something I’m actively trying to do in my own work – to make work that’s a bit busier, fuller, more elaborate, more detailed, because in some ways, my style is very simplistic, and I don’t like the idea of some person or piece of software just copying it as if they came up with those ideas. The AI side of things is obviously more unfair because AI can do this so much quicker than a person, and I do think that that’s exploitative of people’s work and that people’s intellectual property should be protected against AI. Because my own work is so rooted in feeling tactile, organic, and tangible, I’m hoping that any prospective clients understand that using AI instead will not give them the same thing.
TP: What’s next for you? Are there any upcoming projects you’d like to share with us?
CN: Well, my partner Izzy and I just finished hosting our first exhibition with our risograph studio, ‘Way Bad Press’, at Hen’s Teeth in Dublin, and we will hopefully have some zines and other things being released there soon. I’m putting a lot of energy into that and I also have a handful of small things on the horizon that I probably can’t mention quite yet. But do keep an eye on my Instagram, which is generally the hub for everything I do.
Conor Nolan is an artist and illustrator.
