Instagram Pick of the Week | Robert Mirolo

We love Instagram! Why? Because it gives you access to tonnes of visual art at your finger tips! Follow @thisheadstuff to stay up to date with our finds on our favourite app!

Every week HeadStuff’s Visual Arts Editor will feature posts from their favourite artists on Instagram. So add the hashtag #thisheadstuff to be featured!

Up this week is Robert Mirolo aka @grimickis, a freelance illustrator, animator and designer whose work you may recognise from the windows of Kaph or the pages of Totally Dublin and GUTS Magazine. His feed is awash with abstract shapes and bodies that you’ll want to plaster on your walls. He describes his work as “Lars von Queer” and no, he’s not going to explain that one.

I’m not entirely sure what Instagram is to me. I primarily use it to post work. And then smatterings of a caricatured self. It’s kind of a distilled version of Facebook, pure imagery. I find the way that people use it to express identity really interesting, I like the idea of this heavily curated self. I think that a lot of people with my political persuasions are averse to it but I think it’s just a new tool, you can choose to interact with it or not and it’s not going to go away. I think contributing to it in some meaningful way can be more subversive than just ‘opting out’. We live in a culture of selfies and hashtags, and you can do amazing things with selfies and hashtags if you just approach it a bit critically.

Even when I’m swamped with commissions I still try to draw one thing a day that is purely for myself so it’s become the primary receptacle for that. I find the 1:1 aspect ratio kind of challenging to work in which is nice. So often our compositional habits as illustrators are locked into the aspect ratio of standard paper sizes, so it’s a good palette cleanser to work in this square format for a spell every day.

I use a 7H Faber technical pencil and I exclusively use Pilot G-Tec rollerball pens for line-work. They’re the very very very best, albeit a little hard to find and expensive in Ireland. You can order/buy them from Modulor in Berlin for about half the price – PRO TIP. I use a fair bit of Deleter brand inks and dipping pens. The Japanese stuff is always the best. After that I do everything in Photoshop and exclusively use Kyle’s Brushes for everything.

At the moment, Kaye Blegvad, Blanca Miró skoudy and Roman Muradov [are influences on me]. I essentially stole Adrien Merigeau’s approach to flat perspective (thanks Adrian). Steve McCarthy is an Irish illustrator and very close friend and I owe a lot to him with regards to style, approach and even just career advice and the occasional passing forward of jobs.

[The best hashtag going is] #bdsmcommunity. I love how wonky humans can look and I love that wonky humans can find other wonky looking humans to have kinky sex with. I love the disparity in quality, I love the arc from amateur to professionalism, conventionally attractive to conventionally unattractive. Human sexuality in all it’s clunky awkward beautiful glory.

Must-follow Instagram accounts: Die Antwoord, Thongria, Cyan Ryan (my design husband) Pearl Reddington (my actual husband) Annique Van Niekerk and Cesca Saunders are very good at the Internet too. And SpudgunMusicBand obvs.