Howlite Magazine

Multidisciplined artist doesn’t even begin to describe Isaac Kauffman. He has such a wide range of skills, and he is always looking to find a new medium to explore. I had the opportunity to chat with him in his home studio about how this all started and where he plans to expand his talents.

“I think the earliest stuff that got me interested in art would be comic books” Kauffman said. “My dad, when I was probably five or six, gave me like all of his old Garfield books from when he was a kid, and I loved them probably as much as he did.”

Kauffman said he would start drawing Garfield whenever he got bored at home, school or in church. In elementary and middle school, he found the comic Calvin and Hobbes which was another big art inspiration.

There is something freeing about creating something with pen and ink according to Kauffman, even when he is trying something new like air brushing, he comes back drawing black on white or white on black.

“I think starting with pen and ink also always kind of restricts me in a way that is helpful for my brain. When I’m sketching with a pencil, it’s like I’m trying too hard. I’m trying too hard to think about traditionally drawing and shading right,” Kaufman said. “But when it’s like permanent anyway, I feel like I can just kind of go and do it and keep sketching and go with the mistakes.”

This love of art and comics later transitioned to Kaufman going to college for illustration and later taking up photography, videography and digital design.

Aside from physical and digital art, Kaufman also explores the medium of sound. He has a few different origin stories for where he got started with making music.

“I was raised in the Mennonite church, so definitely was brought up with like a hymnal, kind of your classic small town church type of songs,” Kauffman said. “That was the majority of like how I learned to sing and that kind of thing.”

In middle school, Kauffman said he started taking guitar lessons from a local music store teacher but wasn’t the right fit. It wasn’t until he started working with a blue grass guitarist from his church did the instrument started to click from him.

“I learned how to like pick up a song that I like and just teach myself, and I think that was the most invaluable skill that he taught me,” Kauffman explained. “He didn’t even really teach me chords or anything. He was just like, ‘What songs do you like?’ Let’s listen to them and let’s figure out how to play them, and that’s how we’re gonna learn. And that was perfect for me, and that’s kind of how I got into writing my own songs.”

The music project Kaufman releases these songs under is called Abel. Kauffman said the band bounces ideas off each other to make the parts he comes to them with better.”

“I think that’s kind of the beauty of working in a collaborative band is that we can ebb and flow when we want to,” Kaufman said. “It’s been me writing part for part and then bringing it to them. And I think even though that kind of sounds not collaborative, it still is in a sense, and it still sends each part through this kind of process that like makes it shift and makes it more John’s or makes it more Noah’s, and I think there’s just yeah, there’s just a little bit of beauty to trusting others with your art.”

One of the things Kaufman said this collaboration has helped him do is slow down is creative process. Since the release of the album “How to Get Away with Nothing” and single “Doom Cycle,” he has been working on not putting his art out too fast.

“I am pretty impatient as a person, so especially musically, I have to get ideas out. Like, if I have a melody in mind, and I get it recorded. I kind of have to keep working on it,” Kaufman said. “I think the same goes for most of my graphic design and illustration work because especially when you are doing things analogue and by hand, a lot of that process is just so immediate.”

This impatience and need to keep creating is what drives Kaufman to keep finding new mediums and keep working with them even when they are difficult at first. This is what he has been doing with airbrushing recently.

Kaufman explained he had tried to get into airbrushing a year ago, but it didn’t click for him until he started working with more with screen printing.

“There’s just a lot of like nuances in being careful and like sticking a shirt down and like knowing that I need to heat the shirt in between layers of color, just to kind of flash it, and lay down more ink,” Kaufman said. “I never thought about those things when I first picked up the airbrush because I hadn’t been in a screen-printing shop for very long, and I kind of just yeah thought it was easier, and it’s really just you still have to pay attention to kind of the medium itself rather than just the art.”

The beauty of airbrush for Kaufman is that it is free form and makes creating art fun.

“It’s very like graffitiing or spray-painting stuff. Like I think even if you’re not an artist, spray painting is fun,” Kaufman explained. “It’s just like it feels very almost childish. There’s a beauty to that in the medium. And yeah, I’m just learning, learning a lot. I need to figure out how to make stuff look good on dark materials.”

To say updated on Kaufman’s progress with the airbrush and the other projects he is working on check out his website, the Noise Optics Instagram and the Abel Instagram.