Zac Holbrook creates art solely for the sake of art
Chattanooga is saturated with “happy art”—colorful landscapes, pictures of the walking bridge, still lifes, portraits, pretty abstract paintings, most of them created by happy people for the delight of satisfied customers.
In this environment, it can be refreshing to experience something that is genuinely unpleasant and miserable.
Zac Holbrook’s dark explosions of postmodern angst and depression stand out because of this stark conceptual contrast. The artist’s palette consists mostly of black paint, and a bit of white.
“To me, everything has to be black and white, because what I make and what I feel is not suitable for color,” he explains. “Color makes people happy, and nothing I make is supposed to make people happy. If anything, it’s supposed to bum you out.”
Holbrook got his start as a graffiti artist when he was in high school. As he got into doing more traditional art, he taught himself different ways to make things—so that when he had an idea for a piece, he could make it.
“I have never felt like a painter or a sculptor or anything, it’s more like when something pops into my head, I have to make that right now,” he says. “So I’ve been doing that for most of my life, since I stopped being a hoodlum. I got tired of graffiti. For me, it was the medium I was into at the moment, and then that phase passed, and I started working on something else.”
Holbrook manifests his ideas and feelings with a variety of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and collage. He sculpts by casting with resin, plaster, concrete, and whatever else he can get his hands on.
“I learned how to do casting with Matt Dutton—I used to work at Rock City doing Halloween decorations,” he says. “Pretty much everything I know about sculpture, I learned from Matt. He made me understand that art doesn’t have to be so serious, that you can throw something into it because it is your thing—he taught me to not care what other people think, to just make what I think.”
He prefers to work at night, sometimes spending a whole day thinking about what to do, and then starting when it gets dark. His work is inspired by horror movies, crime shows, and professional wrestling. A lot of his collage-based work is based on crime magazines, and many of his pieces incorporate quotes from professional wrestlers.
“I’m into the aesthetic of violent things—I like guns and bloodshed, I think there’s something interesting about it,” he explains. “That’s why I started burning a lot of canvasses, treating the whole thing as a piece of art, not just the image on the painting. By the time I’m through with some of them, they are completely ruined with burns and holes.”
Always carrying a sketchbook with him, he uses the best of his drawings as source material for a series of Zines. “I might get drunk and start drawing, go places and draw, or be socializing and start drawing so I don’t have to be a part of it,” he notes. “I don’t try to say anything—I’m doing it as an exercise to get something out, and if people like looking at it, that’s cool, too.”
If anything, Zac feels like he’s creating his art primarily for himself. “If I put my artwork on Instagram, and nobody likes it, I don’t care—I didn’t make it for anybody but me,” he says. “I can’t tell people anything, I don’t know what’s going on in my own head. I’m not in the position to have a message, I’m just trying to keep my s*** together.
“When you make something for a viewer, you’re telling the viewer something about yourself or about the world. When you make something for yourself, it’s like you have an inside joke that nobody else gets. People can guess all day about what I’m trying to say, but they’ll never know because it is a secret that I have with myself.”
An honest approach to making work keeps him out of trouble. “I do things in my art so I don’t have to do them in real life,” he explains. “I take all of my aggression out that way. I have so much anxiety about stuff in my own life, I don’t really care too much what is going on in the rest of the world. I’m nihilistic—I don’t think there’s a way to fix things, so I don’t try to tell people they can.”
You can follow him on Instagram at zoloftrider.