Jean Jullien

0:03uh it's time now i'm very excited to say to meet our first speaker um so jean julian is a creative who needs very little introduction with an enviable portfolio of art illustration and graphic design that's full of witty and often surprisingly relatable works always executed in his signature hand-drawn style tonight he's joining us to talk through what he's been making during isolation including some personal responses to the current situation a cover for the wall street journal and a painting exhibition so now jean let's hope this works please turn on your video and your audio so we can actually see you and say hello

0:40is he there there he is can you hear me i can hear you fantastic and so jean tell us where you're where you're dialing in from and also uh yeah how you're finding lockdown i guess hi matt i'm dialing in from brittany in on on the west coast of france that sounds sounds lovely quite a good place to be in lockdown i imagine yes okay well listen yeah no no you're you're all good yeah we'll let you know if we can if if there's any issues on that front um i'm going to let you now share your screen and um show us the work that you've been making over the past few weeks um and then i'll duck out and i'll come

1:19back in about 10 12 minutes have a chat uh let's have a look yeah that's working fine over to you okay perfect okay cool all right well i'll get started uh first of all thanks to you tonight for having me tonight and thanks for all of you uh for tuning in um yeah it's a weird weirdest night that uh nicer tuesdays and a weird situation for everyone so i thought i'd talk about what i've been up to um since confinement started um [Music] as in work in the time of covet 19. um for me it weirdly started on on the day of my birthday that's when i first sort of reacted to the current situation um i've got this very self-centered thing of doing a a social network post on the day of my

2:13birthday as a sort of humorous take on on self-pity but strangely i've seen that being reused afterwards by other people in a similar situation so that was nice and that people could relate to that um at the beginning i started also doing music graphic music on what life during quarantine might mean then i guess at this time i didn't really know um because it was just starting and as the whole situation sort of unraveled a strange new reality um appeared to me as i'm sure it has for all of you guys and and this sort of weird bubble bubble-like world appeared with its own sort of rituals uh like the zoom apperative that we've been

3:00doing with friends and and that's actually what we're doing right now as well uh it reminded me of of that character an inspector gadget cartoon that some of you might be familiar with um but beyond that i've also had the leisure of of trying to be creative with whatever i could find around which is something that i do when i'm um when i'm looking for ideas but here i guess i have been looking for ideas and i've had a lot of time on my hand like we all have um i've been doing a little bit of arts and crafts with my kids as well which is what my work normally looks like but there actually had some proper and childlike contribution but beyond um beyond personal little

3:43reactions uh that i've been doing on on social media i've also been quite astounded uh by the amount of social efforts and charity initiatives that have been appearing and i guess in the worst of time some very good bits i've appeared and i've tried uh my best to sort of take part in online initiative like like a lot of us have um one of the first thing i've been doing it was this live drawing thing on instagram for the benefit of the british red cross uh my wife sarah has been a nurse for eight years at the royal london hospital and so the nhs and its workers is something that was quite dear to my to my heart so i've tried to do a little fundraising

4:28and it's something that i'll actually do tomorrow as well for a different charity at 4pm um there's now a live donation button so it's it's quite cool that we're able to do that and the nice thing about that experience that um i could see the comments as i was drawing and what started as something with a specific idea in mind became this really nice collaborative what specific drawing where a lot of people were chiming in and suggesting different workers to um to include it was a really great experience another good project that i've taken part i've been invited to take part in was this project um le card vital which is a french initiative

5:08where a few illustrators got asked to send a design on the theme of writing for research and people could donate money and get cards in exchange and send them so there was a nice take on the communication dilemmas we find ourselves in another initiative was something um created by my friend julian pham which is a fantastic guy linked to um the food world in in paris and now worldwide and he was concerned with the aftermath for um not companies but smaller businesses and craft people uh be a a baker a delivery man a pizza yellow a barista all of these people that sort of make our everyday life that might be impacted and he teamed uh me up with another good

5:57friend of us alexi tayeb whose pen name is tiasa i'm sure a lot of you are familiar with his fantastic work and he came up with the typography and i did the illustration it's just um this sort of icon that will be used as a sort of support network another project was initiated by this brand called literally and they asked a lot of illustrators to come up with a design for a dove to be included in the coloring book that would then be donated to a children's hospital in montreal so that's just a really lovely nice project like there has been many and lastly another project that i took part in was actually me reaching out to um my good friends at only

6:41only the a brand uh based in new york that i've been working with for a few years now i lived in in new york for a bit and it's a city that has been dear to me forever culturally um and obviously as we've all seen and as many other places have been really badly impacted by what's going on now and i just wanted to find a way to sort of create a design for a shared something to then raise money for those in needs and in the end there's a sort of discussion with the guys and only we ended up doing a sort of remix of a design we had done in the past which was this sort of um ny fraternity symbol with people shaking hands and we we've done an update uh symbolizing that yeah that was

7:26definitely still going on but with the right social distancing protection and everything um but like a lot of you have also been trying to carry on working um and i've been i've been receiving a few uh commissions and it was interesting to see that as much as personal reactions the the world of illustration and its content got impacted as it should so that's a cover that i've got us to do for a french magazine called telerama that i've been working with for a few years now and they've always been very supportive of my work i'm very friendly with them they are director laurent and he asked me to design a cover on on this the unraveling situation and i guess at the time because it was still quite unknown the

8:12thing that i wanted to insist on was the fact that um there was a strange new reality but would still have to keep contact just a different kind of contact so that was the final cover another job i did was an editorial for the washington post that i've been doing in literal drawings for a few years now um and it's always just very loose and easy and asking me like you know what's going on for you at the moment you want to react to this subject and and for this one i wanted to uh react on on our current situation with sarah my wife and she's currently off work on maternity leave and she's taking the lion's share of dealing with the kids on a day-to-day

8:53basis but it does feel like this deflating bubble um yeah deflating bubble of isolation where we're trying to work but it's a bit tight um and that you see it in in context and the last commission i wanted to mention was was i wanted to include a little bit of working process because there was a tricky one for me was for the wall street journal um and the pitch was quite loose but it was um this sort of communication breakdown and how does someone say something and it gets heard the other way and as we got more information i didn't realize it was about the current situation with the virus and how a younger generation might tell the older generation to be more careful

9:38and it comes out of a place of love and and care from the younger people but somehow it gets transformed into this alienating feeling of of um restriction from some of the older parts so it makes more sense with the text obviously but it was an interesting case of problem solving for me and lastly something that i want to talk about briefly is uh paintings because i've been doing paintings for the past few years and i've really enjoyed it not as a not in a position to drawings all the more humorous speed that i've been doing but as a parallel path um drawings has always sort of allowed me to be quite focused and and to yeah to be more focused on

10:25humorous situations where the painting is much more poetic slightly um more open for interpretation and i've been going through a lot of um back photos and and things that have been meaning to paint for a long time time passing and landscapes and i think things that we might uh want to see soon all of us i was meant to have a show in new york with chandran gallery on april the 30th obviously as for everybody the situation changed but we thought since everyone was locked in at home why not try to bring um the show into people's home you know after all it's like matt was saying earlier there's one good bit to that

11:07bad situation is that we can actually bring creativity into people's home um for free and everywhere so with that in mind with my brother nico and studio julia uh when lucia designer at studio julia we decided to um come up with this sort of online exhibition prequel which is called homeslice and um we'll be opening it on on thursday so i'll put informations on instagram but everyone can can check it out and i'll be uh i'll be donating some of the the money from that to a charity foundation france i was helping medical workers in france um and will also be doing a print that's where the money will entirely be donated to a relief effort um that's about it i hope

11:52i hope that was okay i'm not very good at talks but thank you very much for listening thank you so much absolutely amazing yeah i'll clap for everyone i think at home um and a lovely lovely kind of uh image to end on as well um i guess people who regularly come to nice tuesdays will not expect this but we're going to do something slightly different in in that we're going to ask a question of each of our um our uh speakers today and kind of those will be things that have been submitted questions that have been submitted from our audience um so one for you john is how has social media influenced

12:24or changed your work someone asks um obviously you have yeah a really big and engaged following on instagram particularly i guess um have you found that that's kind of influenced your work in any way um no for me the the sort of work started with social media because i was sharing some of my work as i was studying at central san martin so that's how i started doing what i do uh and i don't know what influence works so it's a bit of a chicken in the exit situation here yeah fair enough okay well listen thanks very much um if i could ask you to stop sharing your screen and um i'm afraid we're gonna have to ask you to turn off your audio and video thank you very much everyone

13:02there he is good to see you um