How did your artistic journey start?
Drawing was something I did on a hobby level throughout youth.  Mostly comic book style illustration until high school, when I started doing representational graphite drawings of pop culture personalities.  I suppose it officially started half way through my third year of college, when I changed from a business major to art.

In your opinion who are some influential artists of our time?
Matthew Barney has a way of thinking outside of conventional narrative mechanics and developing this interwoven network of mythical and gender related symbolism.  I think he has created some of the most iconic and memorable imagery in recent history.  For me, his work represents almost pure potential, like strange organisms swimming around in prehistoric oceans.  Peter Doig’s paintings have this rare energy, the fact that they’re slightly melting and his color pallette, they’re both surreal and realistic.  His work always looks like it is about to vanish.  And Takashi Murakami, whose 2009 painting “A Picture of the Blessed Lion Who Stares At Death” is in my mind, the great painting of the past decade.

What are some of the themes or subjects that you explore in your work?
Nostalgia, which relates to memory and how things we remember break down, are idealized, become fragmented or are completely forgotten over time.  And uncertainty, being in a constant state of “What happens next?  Who am I? Where did I come from?  What happens when I die?” and the way we have, throughout time, answered these general questions that relate to uncertainty and the unknown.  It is why I use a lot of old photographs or things from pop culture in my work, as well as why I erase parts of those things, I try to articulate the felling of memory.  And why I use a lot of religious/mythological/scientific references, because they help us deal with what happens next.

How did you discover the pigment transfer process and how did it effect your visions..?
In 1999, a girl in a studio next to me was transferring black and white photocopies into gesso and in a few minutes explained the process.  Then, over the next few years, I figured out a lot of the variables.  It allows me to transfer the work I do on the computer, such as the photo manipulations, to canvas or paper.  It bridged the digital and physical world for me.

You talk about different realities between pixel’s and pigments, what are your thoughts on the difference between the two?
The main reason I draw or paint pixels or transfer work I do on the computer to physical surfaces is the reality of the physical world and the digital work becoming more and more intertwined.  I don’t think one is better than the other, so there isn’t any social morality in combining the two.  But each has its own nature.  Computers allow you to be incredibly precise and organized, so I do much of the preparation work on the computer.  And it is so forgiving, you have a history palette, Photoshop layers, you can save different versions of the file, etc.  Then I might do a transfer or reproduce the image in marker or in paint.  Or a combination of the three.  Handmade things have a tactile quality.  They’re always slightly flawed.  I think we relate better to something of this sort.  We empathize with handmade work, more so than with computer work.

May I ask why your characters remain faceless and mysterious, to great effect?
The photos relate to fragmented and incomplete tendencies of memory, so breaking down the stability of the photo is important.  The people in the photos are meant to be the main characters in the story, the ones who come up with the scientific and mythological explanations of things.  So the figures themselves are fragmented, motivated to figure out things and understand their surroundings.  The lines coming out of them are abstractions of their thoughts, like thought bubbles in a cartoon.  They’re also erased because they no longer exist the way they did in the photos, they’re older now and sometimes deceased.  And, finally, they’re family photos.  I want to get rid of specific identities and give the viewer blank templates with which to form a relationship.

What are the main devices or tools for creating your work?
On paper I use Prismacolor and Copic markers, tracing images I’ve prepared on the computer using a light box.  I have a step by step of the transfer process on my site http://www.hollisbrownthornton.com/information/transfer.htm that gives a description of that process.  On canvas, I’ll either use an opaque projector to reproduce that image I’ll then paint in oil or acrylic.  With the oil, I use a lot of paint thinner and stand oil.  For the hard edge acrylic paintings, I use masking tape and cut out each color area with an xacto knife.  I also use dry wall sanding blocks with water on the surface of the acrylic paintings to control texture or make lower layers of paint visible, as well as giving it an overall washed down and eroded effect.

How do you go about preparing for an up coming show?
I don’t know, I really don’t have a good answer.  Months before a show, I’ll do a lot of work, in anticipation for the show, and it usually doesn’t turn out very well, because it is rushed.  But the themes of the shows build off the general  themes I’ve been working with for years, so it is a matter of picking a cohesive and dynamic body of work.

What was the last thing you found, and picked up from the ground to keep?
I have no earthly idea.  I found an old Budweiser can on the ground years ago that was faded on one side from sun light and I saved that.  That’s the last thing I can remember.

Finally do you have any advice for young creative’s?
Work work work.  I think great artists aren’t talented, they’re just hard workers.  I mean, it is a little more complex than that, for instance I think personality traits give people certain advantages, but almost everything comes out of work.  If possible, try to work in the art business for a while, either at galleries or an auction house, to get an understanding of that end.  But in general, be uncompromising, do what you want to do because it is a self motivated career.  And be prepared to make a lot of sacrifices.