Puzzling Inside and Out, for the “Beneath the Surface” exhibition

What does an average day in the life of Kozyndan look like?

D: Hah – that is a great and terrible question! I dunno. Our days are all over the place.

K: It is kind of hard to say what a typical day is. It depends on whether we are working, and what we are working on.

D: Typically though – I get up a few hours before Kozy. I start very slow in the morning – surfing the internet, scrounging for breakfast, writing emails. Then Kozy will wake up between 10 and noon. Usually we go to the gym in the middle of the day, then eat lunch. At some point one of us will run some errands – the bank, the post office, a trip to our office to sign some posters, things like that. We generally don’t get started working on art until well after lunch. We work then until late at night – perhaps till 3 AM, with plenty of breaks for TV, internet (researching anything from future travel plans to porn), video games, dinner, and whatever else we can think of to procrastinate. If we are on deadline though we usually try to dispense with those things and just work work work until we are tired. Usually these days I fall asleep with headphones on listening to whatever audiobook I am listening to at the moment.

Ueno Ghetto, for the “Beneath the Surface” exhibition

What do you think of the current design/art situation in Los Angeles, your current hometown?

K: Oh it’s wonderful here. There is a wealth of talent and it seems like there is a good amount of work for designers and illustrators, and wealth to support a vibrant gallery scene for fine artists. This is one of the world entertainment capitals, so creative people are drawn here and the economy is good. That is a good environment for artists to work in.

D: It’s also a good place to be because its such an odd town. There is little separation of rich and poor, high and low culture, ethnicities. It’s all jumbled together. It’s sort of a breeding ground for strangeness. It is also rather spread out, one of the most spread out cities we’ve ever been to, without good public transportation. So things are kind of hidden, and its easy to do your own thing and not be influenced by the same things everyone around you is. I like this kind of isolation. I think it allows for the huge variety of work produced here. We don’t really follow the design and art scenes here too closely these days, I think we’d both rather be hiking up in the hills than being seen at art openings, but just from the quality and variety of the work our friends here do, and the success they’ve had, I would say Los Angeles is a really vibrant place for creatives.

Small Town Lovers

Do you have designers/artists/books/and any other things or people you’ve been influenced by?

D: Its always hard to answer that. We don’t really think too much about where our style comes from or what kinds of things we like in art. I think that most of the people i really like these days, I discovered after we had already begun working together and established our styles. I really love a lot of artist that have shown with Mizuma Art in Tokyo. People like Yamaguchi Akira, Makoto AIda, Kondoh Akino, and Kyotarow. I think most of them, Kozy and I loved making detailed complex, odd images. I am not sure I would call them influences, but I really love their work now.

K: We also like the work of children’s book artists like Dugin & Dugina, Wanda Gag, and David Wiesner, Cartoonists like Jordan Crane, Chris Ware, and Winsor McCay. More than other art though we are influenced by many other things – music is a big force in my life. I need new and challenging music like I need food and air to breathe. Most of our work is influenced by nature – animals, the natural world. There are very few works of ours that do not feature animals or some natural environment. When we aren’t working we travel a lot, and mostly love hiking and scuba diving and going to zoos.

D: Yeah, just last year Kozy got started on scuba diving and it took over our life. We went to Okinawa, Thailand, Hawaii, and Australia to dive, and hence the last year has been filled with work about the Bunnyfish and work set in and around water.