Jettila Lewis, artist and illustrator – Chicago Reader

Jettila Lewis is an artist and illustrator whose hand is animated by music. Growing up in Pasadena, the 38-year-old artist rarely spoke but drew obsessively. Always attracted to the esoteric and strange, they had ambitions to work in comics and animation, and in high school, they had a secret life as a yaoi artist—that is, a manga-inspired cartoonist who focuses on romances between male characters. That helped them get hired to illustrate a writer’s graphic novel, but at age 25, they developed a bad case of tennis elbow, which combined with burnout to put their artistic ambitions on hold indefinitely. 

Since moving to Chicago in 2017, Lewis has slowly rekindled their creative passions. For three years, they worked for Dark Matter as a barista, where they also contributed to a mural and created artwork for the 2021 Intellectual Curiosity coffee blend. That experience—along with the local connections they made, particularly in the music community—inspired them to return to art full-time, and later in 2021, they began working entirely for themselves. Their output runs the gamut—they’ve illustrated games and comics as well as made clothing and other functional art—but they’re particularly focused on art for the music community, and they’ve collaborated with artists such as Mother Fortune, Patrixia, Lengua Salvaje, and the Breathing Light. To Lewis, every image is a song—a rhythm made concrete—and they hope their artwork carries future generations toward something hopeful.

As told to Micco Caporale

I think music is the most powerful art form because it transcends species and time. Chicago is such a musical and artistic city. I’m learning most amazing art comes from Chicago. I didn’t know Smashing Pumpkins is from Chicago until I moved here. As a child, I was so gloomy, and I was a near mute. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—like, imagine a seven-year-old going, “Wow, this music sounds like how I feel.” It went from soft and kind of sad to rage and screaming. Every song was its own universe. Billy Corgan’s music spoke for me.

Growing up in Pasadena was a nightmare. I was just really cold all the time. My body couldn’t regulate itself to the weather. I was always uncomfortable. Everyone around me thought I was a weirdo, so I was an easy target to be picked on. I would just hide and draw.

I come from a really big family. I’m number 11 of 14. My dad was a jazz musician and my mom was a fashion designer, so they taught us a lot of art. They wanted us to be self-sufficient and not another cog in the machine. Every single one of my siblings, we all know how to sing and make music and be creative. Only some of us were able to utilize it for our livelihoods. It’s just the circumstances of living in the hood and being Black and Indigenous. The world that we live in wasn’t designed for us to do well.

We grew up Catholic but not very strict, so we saw all sorts of shit. I was always drawn to the esoteric, but I’m also a huge science and space nerd—just anything that was the opposite of being raised in a Catholic house filled with people in poverty. When I saw The Crow as a kid, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s what I want in my life.” 

Then I learned what a gimp was, and that resonated with me too. I mean, the word itself: gimp. There’s not another word like it. You hear the word, and you’re like, “What’s a gimp?” And then you see it, and you’re like, “Just . . . what is that?” I knew, in the future, I’m going to be associated with these types of people somehow. I was always like, “The world is bizarre.” I never really associated any of that stuff with sex. I just thought, “Oh, when you grow up, you get to do weird shit.” I thought that’s what being an adult is. 

I always knew I wanted to be an artist. I started out wanting to be an animator, and as a kid, I’m like, “Well, if I’m gonna be an animator, I have to learn how to draw everything.” And once I figured out I’d be drawing other people’s cartoons, I was like, “Fuck that, I’m just going to do comics instead.” I wanted to have variety [in my skills] so I could make anything in any style I wanted, so all I ever did was draw.

Everyone knew I drew, but in high school, I had a secret life where I was a yaoi artist. I was doing pretty well. I had a fake name and a small following. The yaoi world was good to me. Then [at 19] I got work with this guy doing comics, which knocked me off the yaoi course. I worked with him until I was 25. 

He did the writing. I did the art. Back then, I’d do a sketch, then go over the sketch with pens, scan it, go into Photoshop and edit it—it was so much work for so little. At the time, I didn’t realize how little [money] I was receiving because all this was new to me. I had no time, and because drawing was everything I did, I developed a lot of pain in my arm and hand. I was not sleeping or eating right, and my family life was really chaotic. I was very depressed. We finished the graphic novel, and he’s like, “OK, time to do another.” 

I developed tennis elbow and told him, “Hey, I can’t work on this anymore. I need a break because my arm hurts.” And he’s like, “You’re not hungry enough. You don’t want this enough.” I stopped working for him after that. Like, what the fuck. I am telling you it hurts to hold a pencil, and I will be permanently unable to draw if I don’t take some time off to recuperate. I can’t just will my way past tennis elbow. He saw me as a tool rather than, like, a fucked-up kid who needed guidance. 

The last five years before moving here were so chaotic. I was floating all over the place and couldn’t land anywhere. My experience in LA was mostly like, “Oh, you look cool. I want to be seen next to you.” Or, “You look like I could eat off of you.” I used to go to this goth club, and they hired me to be a go-go dancer. I stopped straightening my hair, so it was big and awesome. After that, I noticed a switch in people—it felt like they just wanted to consume me, like this exotic thing.

I was still doing art here and there, knowing that at some point I would get back into it full-time. I just needed to heal first, which turned out to be a slow process. It took years. I took a job at a grocery store, which wasn’t bad. I love physical labor. I was the best bagger and cart pusher. I worked in a grocery store for a long time. I was still getting freelance jobs through Craigslist. It was pretty awful because I didn’t have a lot of guidance on, like, how to not get scammed.

While I was go-go dancing, I was friends with a lot of sex workers, and some of them were camgirls. I decided to see if that’s something I wanted to do. LA is this horrific place with predators at every turn. I wanted to flip that around and make money off these creeps. I cammed for about a year but stopped because all my clients started telling me their sad life stories. I was like, “Oh, these guys aren’t even jerking it to me. I’m like their therapist.” But I didn’t want to absorb their sadness.

My brother Henry is a big-deal tattoo artist. One of his friends was a painter [in Chicago], and she insisted on flying me out for her art show. She was like, “You should go to Chicago. You’ll love it.” [In 2017,] I came to visit and was only supposed to be here for a couple of days, and I ended up staying a couple of weeks. Then a month later, I’m like, “See ya—I’m moving to Chicago.”

I honestly moved here to die. A bunch of stuff happened in my family, and I’m like, “You know what? I’m just gonna come here and die in the snow.” I had a stupid thing with a boy, and that broke me. Then I’m like, “Of all the things that have happened, this is the thing that breaks me?” I did a complete reevaluation of my life and looked back at all the stuff that I love and the things I sacrificed. Yaoi was one of them.

[Coming out of lockdown,] I knew it was my time again. I had tried several times to freelance full-time, and it didn’t work out. This time, I realized that I’m such a good worker wherever I have a job, to the point where I feel my coworkers are slacking. I realized I needed to start giving my own work ethic to myself. 

I didn’t know what the art world was before I moved here. I had an idea of what it might be, and I was wrong. [I didn’t know about] the whole idea of, like, “I’m going to collect this because it might be worth more later,” and people not even hanging things on their wall or connecting with the pieces—just letting them sit in a file cabinet. I hate the way that art has been commodified and used for status instead of, like, a time capsule of when it was made or what it’s reflecting on. I would much rather make a poster for a punk show or something, because that has more significance and meaning to me.

I want to inform younger generations that you’re not doomed. When you’re young, you feel like, “Oh, the world’s ending and everything sucks, and we don’t have a future.” I’m like, “No, you do. It just feels like shit right now, but it’s always kind of shitty!”

My dad was born in the 30s, and my mom was born in the 40s. They had to overcome so much, and even them having so many of us, and us being Black and Indigenous—they had intentions that we would help create art for the next generation. I was like, “I have to carry this torch.” What else is there to do? This fake-ass world—made by what I call “bleach demons”—is so artificial and insufficient and fake. 

I think we’re experiencing the collapse of that. I want to be one of the many artists that helps light the way for people who feel like they have nothing. Like, no, you have everything. I’m proof, because I come from extreme poverty. I come from a place where we’re set up to fail, and I fought against it with my art.

Art is for everyone. Creativity is a key to freedom.