Artist Adriana Lozano on discovering new music through drawing

It’s Nice That has partnered up with Spotify’s Fresh Finds, the go-to playlist collection for emerging artists across genres. Visual artist Adriana Lozano teamed up with a selected group of independent musicians, portraying them in her signature style. We chat to Adriana about her research-led process to create illustrative representations of each featured artist.

Upon finding a new musical love, one of the most thrilling elements of discovery is the process of learning about the artist. Once hooked on a new track or album, most of us usually adopt the same habit of trying to find out as much as possible about this new musical crush, heading online to read interviews or snooping on their social media accounts. Learning who this artist is personally is a significant moment when connecting with a musician, especially when their art can feel like it directly relates to you. It’s all part of the joy of discovering new music.

To signify this moment and the excitement it evokes, as part of It’s Nice That’s collaboration with Spotify’s suite of Fresh Finds playlists, we’ve commissioned artist Adriana Lozano to create a series of bespoke portraits. Creating detailed portrayals of the best in independent new music, each of Adriana’s pieces offers a deeper sense of who these artists are, and provides a chance to get to know them and their craft in a new visual way.

Discovering new music via drawing has been an exciting process for Adriana, who doesn’t often work in this realm within her artworks. Noting how most of us often “end up listening to what you are already used to, it’s amazing to find how discovering something new opens your emotional spectrum,” she says. Relating this feeling back to her own experience of “having moved from the city to a dry tropical forest town, I am getting these crystal-like sensations from hearing different new artists,” she reflects.

Even just working while listening to music has been a new process for Adriana, who relays back the shock “surprise and stupefaction” of a friend when she admitted “that I draw for hours in absolute silence,” she explains. Although never before having a soundtrack to her creative work, the artist finds that music still acts as a backdrop of influences, citing that “there is a relationship between the way I start a drawing and the way a song is composed.” For example, when developing a piece she’ll often utilise words, and creating her own version of lyrics is a regular approach. These snippets of sentences then become “a tune that goes into my head and repeats itself impassively, requesting a specific kind of attitude in all the gestures I have to do.”

With all this research in mind, Adriana decided to stick to the tools she knows best when it came to creating each piece. Sitting at her desk with her trusty “colour pencils and sharpener”, each drawing is composed carefully by hand. Once she felt like she’d utilised the hands-on elements as much as possible, Adriana then pulled each drawing up onto her husband’s extra large monitors to check the details, making the most of “his skills to calibrate them together,” she adds.

Having her final works presented to such a wide audience as Spotify’s has “been a challenge and a dream” for Adriana. Being given the trust to expand her highly characterful and detailed drawings has definitely been a learning curve, but, as the artist puts it, “How often are you asked to do exactly what you like to do, by people that are not only kind fans of your work but are also pushing you to learn and improve?” she asks. “I couldn’t be happier!”