Interview with Artist Logan Stahl

By Nicolas Palermo | Posted Thursday, March 4, 2021

In her book What it Is, underground comics legend Lynda Barry explains that fantasy worlds in art aren’t created to escape reality. Rather, their existence helps us to stay in reality. To bear it. “We have always done this; used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.”

Logan Stahl is an illustrator from NJ whose images help me do just that. The sci-fi inspired worlds that his characters inhabit portray, but are not limited to: scenes of warriors battling insect-like beasts, buildings that somehow look both ancient and futuristic and nomads trudging through seemingly endless deserts (are they escaping something or just wandering to feel alive?) Logan takes hints from comic book and manga greats that many of us deeply admire, but his style is still distinctly his own.

Hi Logan! How are things?

Logan Stahl: Hey, thanks for reaching out! I’m doing pretty well, all things considered.

Where are you currently based out of?

I live in Somerville, NJ.

What are your favorite mediums to work in?

I primarily work with felt-tipped pens for linework and photoshop for colors. They’re what I have the most experience using and they’re both cheap, quick, and clean to use. I regularly work with markers and colored pencils as well, and for a while I was taking oil painting classes until COVID got in the way. In general, I enjoy working in any medium, but I’m usually limited in my choices by time, money, and desk space haha.

You mention in your Patreon account bio that you are “hugely influenced by Moebius, Otomo, Wayne Barlowe and Miyazaki.” When I look at your work, I see these influences coming through — especially in the way your characters interact and in the colors and shading. How did you initially discover these artists? What works by them had the biggest impact on your style?

Wayne Barlowe I found first. I had An Alphabet of Dinosaurs as a kid, and I still think it’s one of the most superb collections of paleoart ever produced. I also had Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials and Expedition. Everything he does is just perfect — he brings the gravitasand drama of an artist like Thomas Cole or Jean-Léon Gérôme to illustrations of aliens and demons and dinosaurs. I never get tired of going back through his books.

Otomo I discovered in my tail end of high school — I think Akira was the first anime I ever actively sought out to watch and I was blown away. I tracked down the manga soon after that and devoured it. I find his art almost intimidating — the soaring cityscapes and labyrinthine industrial depths his characters inhabit are daunting in their scale and complexity, and no details are ever sacrificed for convenience or simplicity in his work.

Moebius I found my freshman year of college, around the time I started drawing seriously. For quite a while I didn’t know anything about him or his comics — I just kept finding more and more drawings by him on the internet, each one more evocative and bizarre than the last. The color, the linework, the designs — all of it enchanted me and still does. He’s definitely the artist I’ve spent the most time trying to emulate.

Miyazaki I discovered when one of my best friends brought over a DVD of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Nausicaä to me is just perfect — I couldn’t ask for anything more in a story. In style it’s like a pastiche of all the 60s/70s/80s sci-fi / fantasy novels I grew up reading and in substance it’s pretty darn heavy. Over the years I’ve been working my way through the rest of the Ghibli canon, but Nausicaä will always be my favorite. Fun fact: Moebius actually named his daughter Nausicaä, after Miyazaki’s titular princess, and Miyazki has said he “directed Nausicaa under Moebius’s influence.”

Your bio also mentions that you’ve been published in “RPG zines.” The hands-on, DIY process of making zines is so crucial to the foundations of underground art and music scenes. I love that they’re still prevalent today. With that being said, I’ve never heard of that specific kind of zine. What exactly is an RPG zine? How did your collaborations with these RPG zine-makers come about?

Well, you’re in good company because I hadn’t heard of RPG zines either before I started working on them haha. The gist of it is this: RPG zines are fan-made supplements for tabletop role-playing games (“TTRPG”s or “RPG”s), such as Dungeons & Dragons. Usually they’ll contain homebrewed settings, adventures, or gameplay rules and they’re pretty short in length. The first art commission I ever did was when someone online reached out to me to ask if I could illustrate a zine for them. Since then my work has been featured in a few relatively successful zines, and I guess my name’s been spreading through the RPG community because I’ve had pretty steady work doing those kinds of illustrations for the last year or so. I myself don’t play TTRPGs too often (from a lack of experience and time, not from a lack of interest or enjoyment), but I’ve gotten to meet a lot of really cool people doing this kind of work!

Also, to respond to what you said about art and music zines — I would love to work on more stuff like that. I’m really into the Jersey DIY music scene and I actually did cover art for a split EP between a couple local bands a few years back but unfortunately nothing more since that.

What is your favorite part about your artistic process?

I love being able to visually represent something that started out as an idea in my head. It’s incredibly satisfying to look down at a piece of paper and see a picture of something that I had only imagined before. It’s the same thing that’s kept me drawing since I was a kid and it never gets old.

Do you have a favorite project or piece in recent memory that you’d like to talk about?

From 2018 to late 2020, I wrote and illustrated a sci-fi / fantasy book written in the form of a travel journal. It’s called Coelum and I put a lot of love and effort into it. The art and writing is all complete, I’m just working with my publisher to actually put it out there, so hopefully that should be available digitally in about a month or so and, if everything goes according to plan, we want to do a physical release at some point as well. Aside from that, I’m currently working on an RPG zine called Desert Moon of Karth written by Joel Hines that’s all about space cowboys and aliens slugging it out on a desert planet. It’s delightful to illustrate and it made over 40 times its funding goal on Kickstarter, so that’s something to check out if you get a chance. Heavily inspired by Dune, Cowboy Bebop and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books — all stuff that I love dearly.

What are you working on now? Where can we follow you and find your art?

Right now in addition to Karth I’m working on more RPG zines and lots of smaller commissions here and there and that’s probably going to take up most of my time over the next couple months. I’ve also been working a bit on a collaborative book with a few of my friends who are also illustrators. It’s going to be a faux buyer’s guide to space mercenaries, with each of us designing and illustrating a bunch of sci-fi bounty hunters and writing up stories for them. That’s kind of on hold at the moment as we’ve all been (fortunately!) busy with commissions, but it’s something I look forward to getting back to down the line.

If you want, you can follow me on twitter, Instagram, or Tumblr:
https://twitter.com/Lil_Tachyon
https://www.instagram.com/liltachyon/
https://lil-tachyon.tumblr.com/

Thank you so much for speaking to me, it’s been a pleasure!

Interview with Ken Kaplan (Quantum Floats)

By Sonia Schnee | Posted Monday, December 3, 2018

Has anyone ever asked you, “Do you want to go floating?” If so, you’ve probably asked, “Well, what do you mean by ‘floating?’” Quantum Floats in Bedminster, NJ is a place where you can do exactly as it sounds — float, in a warm, dark, quiet place. If meditation, relaxation, and getting in touch with your innermost thoughts are your kind of thing, it’s worth checking out — and probably different than any other experience you’ve had so far. Enjoy our interview with Quantum Floats owner Ken Kaplan. Learn about what inspired him to start a float center, the various benefits of floating, and enjoy some holiday discounts in the links below.

What's your name, where are you from, and where are you based now? 

KEN KAPLAN: I’m Ken Kaplan.  I was born in Flushing, New York.  My wife Maria and I have spent the last 30 years living in Bridgewater, NJ. 

You run both a law firm and a floatation center. Which came first?

I’ve been a corporate (business) lawyer for 30 years.  In 2013, my partner Glenn Williams and I co-founded the law firm of Kaplan, Williams and Graffeo – a business law firm based in Morristown, NJ.  Shortly after that, my cousin Brian Graffeo joined the firm as a partner. 

It may sound cliché, but our law firm is unique in the way we interact with our clients to help them achieve their goals and objectives.  As a breed, lawyers are taught to be risk adverse.  Lawyers tend to be good at spotting issues, but often shy away from proposing solutions.  Lawyers often think it is not their province to step into the role of solution provider, especially when the solution requires that they leave the comfort zone of issue spotting and take on the role of business advisor.  That kind of lawyer is a rare breed.  The lawyers at Kaplan Williams are solution providers. That search for solutions is the same driving force that led me to open Quantum Floats in 2015.  Quantum Floats is a floatation tank center located in Bedminster, NJ. 

What is the mission of Quantum Floats?

Our mission is to relieve stress in the community, especially the business community.   At first glance, the law business and the float business may seem unrelated.  In fact, floating can have a profoundly beneficial impact on business.  People engage in the same behavior patterns over and over again.  Those patterns are driven by thoughts below the level of conscious awareness.  Yet, those thoughts are the primary contributors to whether or not we achieve our goals and objectives.  Floating allows a person to examine those deeper thoughts, and the workshops and seminars we offer at Quantum Floats take the floating experience much further by showing our clients how to change those patterns so that they can better express who they are. 

How do you want people to feel once they've used your service? 

What we try to do at Quantum Floats is help our clients understand that whatever emotions, feelings or thoughts come up for them is self-generated and not caused by forces outside of their control.  While we do have to constantly navigate the outside world, we’re in the driver’s seat in terms of how we react to those external experiences.  That’s a great thing because once people start to see that, they can start to change their patterns of behavior and get rid of the anger or stress or anxiety they experience.  Quantum Floats exists so that people can do just that. 

What’s the link between floating and stress-relief?

Floating relieves stress.  Our clients often comment that they are more relaxed and that they bring that relaxation with them outside of their float experience to their jobs and personal lives.  From a scientific perspective, the relaxation our clients experience has to do with the adjustment of thoughts below the level of feelings.  Those deeper thoughts are the ones that generate the stress people experience in their lives.  The ability to access and adjust those thoughts is what makes floating such a powerful modality for relieving stress. 

For our clients who want to take the experience further, we offer one-of-a-kind workshops and seminars where clients learn how to improve the way they think and communicate, which helps them accomplish the professional and personal goals they set for themselves.

How did you first discover floating? What kind of impact has it had on your life?

My experience with floating has made a huge impact on my life.  I first heard about it in 2011 at a business networking event.  I figured I’d give it a try.  Up to that time, I had tried an assortment of conventional and non-conventional modalities to deal with stress.  Most of them helped, but they seemed to fall short of getting to the root cause of the stress.  There weren’t many float centers around at that time, but I found a woman who had a float tank in her house.  It seemed strange at first because I had never even seen a float tank, and my first reaction was “why would I ever want to spend an hour floating in water?”  Yet, after just a few sessions, I knew I was on to something. 

Floating is like meditation on steroids.  It’s like taking an elevator down to the depths of thought – the very place where our stress arises. 

I remember coming out of the float tank very relaxed, and I also remember taking that relaxation with me home and into work.  But the experience was still vague to me.  I didn’t know what the experience was about, much less what I could do with it to address the stress I was experiencing all the time.  I lacked an understanding of how thought works. 

Around that time I met John Worthington, who in the early 1970’s opened up one of the very first float centers in the country. John’s an interesting guy. He knows as much about thought as anyone I’ve ever met, and he’s taken that understanding and put it together in a series of workshops and seminars where people can change their lives.  I know, that’s a big statement, but it’s true.  We hold ourselves back by thought patterns we’ve been running since a very young age.  We offer these seminars now at Quantum.   I’ll tell you this with absolute conviction that while anyone can learn skills to modify thought, not everyone wants to.  It’s work, and the work often involves comes face to face with evasions and denials. 

What kind of people are you looking to connect with?

I’m looking for businesses and people that have the conviction and tenacity to make profound changes in their lives.  

What words of advice or encouragement would you give to someone who wants to follow a similar passion, or is maybe facing obstacles similar to what you've faced?

I’d tell them that most of the good things in life require hard work and that hard work pays off in rewards.  The work we do here at Quantum pays off in rewards in the form of better relationships and in the form of being able to better express who you really are.  Sometimes we assume that the people we admire most had an easy path to where they are now.  Most often, that is not the case.  Successful people have the drive to pick themselves up when they fall, no matter how many times they fall.  Those falls are just lessons.  It is useful to keep this in mind if you’re the kind of person who wants to improve your life by changing the way you think about things.   

What's next on the horizon for you? Do you have any special deals, sales, promotions going on?  

We’re running a holiday promotion at Quantum Floats to introduce people to floating.  We’re offering single floats and gift certificates at $65 (reduced from $85) and we’re offering a 3-float package for $175 (reduced from $255).  We’re also offering $100 off our Introduction to the Art of Rewriting workshop – now $499 (reduced from $599).

Finally, how can people find Quantum Floats online?

You can find us in any of the following ways:

By stopping in at our facility: Bedminster Medical Plaza, 1 Robertson Drive, Suite 13, Bedminster, NJ

By calling to book an appointment or schedule a tour: (973) 782-3227

On Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/quantumfloats/
On Twitter: @Quantum Floats
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quantum_floats/

Or by downloading the “Quantum Floats” app in the App Store or on Google Play.