What We Paint in the Shadows: Exploring Vulnerabilities Through Art with Roberta Railaitė

This week’s guest is Roberta Railaitė, a Vilnius-based freelance illustrator and crypto artist known for her dark but thoughtfully melancholic work.

Using a striking and moody palette of reds, blues, black, and white, she creates haunting scenes that delve into the human psyche.
Her art explores themes of anxiety, fear, and dread, with underlying desires for love and understanding, masterfully conveyed through tones, shapes, and colors.
In This Episode, We Discuss

• Childhood cartoon influences:
  • Dragonball Z
  • Samurai Jack
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog - “return the slab”
• How Roberta’s work developed after therapy
• ‘Insatiable Hunger’ - Pigs heads and George Orwell ”So the pig head is just an homage, my trauma”
• Relating to Orwell’s work through Lithuania’s Soviet past
• ‘A memory from the past’ - Genesis piece of SuperRare and one of Roberta’s favorite
• ‘Big Sister’ - Collaboration with Dead Seagull
• ‘The Darkest Alley’ - collaboration with Ryan D. Anderson (https://twitter.com/RailaiteR/status/1631550426905542659?s=20)
• Roberta’s a big fan of Samira Ingold (RA:IN) and Lion Young
• On being full-time for around 18 months.
• The importance of getting offline and touching some grass
• Let’s all calm down a bit, especially around challenging subjects. Shifting focus from the drama that pops up all the time.
• Advice for new people in the space: “just find people you really vibe with”
• Letting the ideas come to you. Roberta starts with compositions, and builds from there. The story builds itself.
• Digital illustration was self-taught for Roberta, she still uses her WACOM tablet and stylus and photoshop, After Effects for animation.
• Roberta’s recognisable colour palette, her journey in developing it. The red is especially important to her - Twin Peaks reference!
• Zdzisław Beksiński, ( za-jee-zwav bek-chinski ) as a source of inspiration, an artist who is renowned for his dark subject matter, as well as his own gruesome murder. How his work reminds Roberta of weird AI art. HR Giger too.
• Marina Abramovic, queen of performance art.
• Be the good and inspire others to do more good, and give your friends compliments!

Roberta’s Links

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/RailaiteR
• Website: https://railaiter.com/
• Interview: https://www.iseeyou.gallery/post/interview-with-roberta-railaitė

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