Interview with Wong Dowling
by Dieter Hall
New York, May 2002DH: Wong, where and when did you start your work?
WD: I was born in South Carolina in 1978 and when I was 7 my family moved to east New York. I have been drawing since I was about 5 years old. I always liked to draw and started out with doing cartoons and comic strips about figures like "Pac-Man", "Sheila" and "He-Man", but making up my own stories for them.
DH: From the comic strips you went to drawings. How do you come up with the images? What interests you?
WD: Well, a lot is about men. As I said, I started out with figures like "He-Man", all buffed up with a big sword. Then in 5th grade I drew these super heroes in their underwear and tank tops. Nowadays it is more about the situations in my life that lead me to the images .For example the drawing where two guys are sitting in a tiny room, slightly depressed, maybe thinking about their relationship.
Proletariat,1999
22" X 14", color pencils on paper
DH: Your work is figurative. Do you draw from life?
WD: I draw from life, in the subway for example, people pose for me, but I also use photographs or my imagination, all these things are combined.
DH: Do you invent situations?
WD: Some of it is pure fantasy. The stuff I know I can't do, but it's in the back of my head. It's my way of living out these things. There is this drawing of men in a bathhouse. But I've never been to one. A lot of people who see it assume that I've been there. But a lot of time a drawing is based on things I've seen going on like the drawing of these two guys in the Fulton Street train station. I realized, only after a friend pointed it out to me, that a lot of men were cruising each other. So I went back there with a camera and checked out the scene. And there is also stuff with family and how we relate to each other. Things I can't really say or express in words. I also teach in a private Christian School and there I can't talk about my personal life. When I was growing up I knew I was gay, so drawing was then, and is now, a way to deal with that, to feel comfortable with it and also, I guess, to survive.
Come and Play in the Milky Night, 2001
22" X 28", color pencils on paper
DH: You also do murals?
WD: The murals started when I was 15. I volunteered to do a school-yard mural. The lady in charge saw my drawings and then the next year I was hired to do a different wall at a health care center about drugs, Aids and the people from the community. In my school I did one that has all these Christian themes. The murals depict things that are not really the stuff that I would do; it's community oriented. I would love to do a mural and have total control. There is this guy who just goes and paints on walls of abandoned buildings. So I was thinking of doing something like this. There are also a lot of abandoned subway tracks, so maybe I could do murals there.
DH: In your drawings you use pencils. Do you work with other materials?
WD: I do use other materials. Obviously for murals I need paint. But I don't really like paint; it's messy. Pencil is easy, you just sharpen it and fill in the color. And pencils have the same effect and it's cheaper too. I like it, I have more control with the pencil
DH: Are all your models black?
WD: Well, I guess it's a preference. I'm a black man. I have nothing against anybody else. They come up if one catches my eye. But so far that's been most of my experience. I only can paint what I experience or what fascinates me. My first boyfriend was Latino, so there are a lot of drawings of him.
DH: Would you like to do a gay comic book now?
WD: Yeah, I'm kind of working on one these days. I'd like to do a story of a gay super-hero.
Wong Dowling is an artist and teacher living in New York.
Dieter Hall is a painter living and working between New York and Zurich.
All images courtesy of the artist.