Jason Soles of Gods Below Interview
2026-6-13
Seattle WA
Jason Soles
Photo: Natalie Felix
At the Georgetown Carnival, I mEt up with Jason Soles, an artist in Bone and bronze as well as other media. I have interviewed him before for a previous copy of Voltage in the late 90’s when he lived in Seattle and was part of Catalyst Studios.
Marc17: I am here with Jason Soles of Gods Below. How are you doing tonight, Jason?
Jason Soles: Great, but I’m exhausted. We just got through vending at Georgetown Carnival and with set up we were there for something like 15 hours. So yeah, a little sun stroked.
Marc17: I've known you for a long time and you've gone into mainly metal casting lately, bronze and I think you do some silver and other things. Is that all you do now or do you still do resin?
Jason Soles: Well I do a bit of everything. The small-scale bronze and silver work, the jewelry work, I mostly limit to a couple months a year. I do lost wax casting and I like to get the wax work done in the winter months because it’s a lot easier to work with before the summer heat rolls in. I do resin work all year, but the seasons impact that work too. In the winter it can take forever for the resin to cure and in the hottest of the summer it can set before you have time to pour it from the cup. I also do large-scale bronze casting approximately once a year at the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle for the open house. Unfortunately that means investing at the end of August when the heat can make your whole sprue structure collapse under its own weight.
Marc17: So what medias are you working with right now?
Jason Soles: I sculpt in clay, usually Monster Clay because it was easier to get during Covid. I cast in polyurethane resin, hydrostone, sterling silver, and bronze. I want to do more sculpture scale bronze in the near future, so I am starting to look for some new foundries. I am hoping to get a meeting with a foundry in Walla Walla next month that may be able to cast my work.
Marc17: So you have a lot of your pieces have evocative names. I think there's a hunter's mask and other things or is there?
Jason Soles: There are about 200 hunter’s masks. It's just a name I chose for that style of mask with the skull plate, antlers, etc. The name stuck with me from a trip I took with AS Koi across the East Coast over New Years ’99. We were visiting a friend of AS's who mentioned bow hunting his neighbors, and that kind of stuck with me. So I've been making masks for people to wear while they bow hunt their neighbors for the last, you know, 27 years or whatever.
Marc17: What about your other pieces? Do they have like, do you have any like fictional mythology or real mythology that goes with them?
Jason Soles: My naming conventions for my pieces are largely drawn from folklore and the natural world. That and the occult, witchcraft, and the scientific record. Honestly though, I am not one for deep stories behind my work. I like each piece to speak for itself.
Marc17: Your inspirations.
Jason Soles: Yeah, definitely. “Gods Below” itself is a reference to the chthonic gods of old Rome.
Marc17: You used to live in Seattle, you moved to Spokane. How are things in Spokane? You're just living there and the art scene as opposed to Seattle.
Jason Soles: Well, it's a tundra. I mean literally. So it's freezing in the winter, knock on wood, or it's blazing hot in the summer, which we're about to enter. We definitely prefer the cold. But as far as the scene goes, we've got a good group of friends.
Actually, we just started an art collective called PSYCHOPOMP. I had been hosting a small private group show in my home called Blessed Blood for the past few years and this year we moved it to Petunia & Loomis, a great local oddities shop. The show is Lupercalian themed and always fell in February. After this year’s show the artists started talking and we decided to form Psychopomp to better promote our joint projects in the future. The group is made up of Natale Felix (Hark!), Gitta Siig (Benign Neglect and Dead Set Ephemera), AS Koi (Catalyst Studios), Missy Narrance (Bald Bastard Art), Rebecka Anderson (KNOX 1984), and myself.
Spokane is a smaller town than Seattle for sure, but there is a lot going on. And if there isn’t, you make something happen. It’s also pretty walkable if you live near downtown, which beyond a given neighborhood is not really true of Seattle. It's smaller, but also that just means you get to know everybody rather than just being one name and face amongst many.
Marc17: So you work in the gaming industry. Do you want to mention your day job and any other ideas you might have for projects?
Jason Soles: A million years ago I worked as a 3D painter for Wizards of the Coast, but I've been working for Privateer Press since 2002 or so. For most of that time I was the lead developer of WARMACHINE and HORDES, though I also worked on Monsterpocalypse and a handful of boardgames, card games, and RPGs.
Marc17: You did a game called Unhallowed Metropolis. Can you tell us anything up with that lately?
Jason Soles: Yeah, I co-wrote Unhallowed with Nicci Vega and we pressed most of the people we knew at the time into service for our Neo-Victorian photo parties, as you well know. That first edition of Unhallowed was released in 2007, so it's coming on to its 20 year anniversary, and I have a few ideas for future evolutions of the game, but I can't really talk about it right now. Just starting to put pen to paper. And you know how that goes, who knows when the undiagnosed ADHD is going to kick in and I will be on to something else. Better not to talk up anything until I’m sure it has legs.
Marc17: Where can we, what are we, what do we look for on the internet if we want to find you in your work?
Jason Soles: Gods Below is on Instagram, Facebook, and Etsy, primarily. Someday I may throw together a gallery page, but that’s it for now.
Marc17: So what do you think about dark art? That's a term that's used a lot. Do you think there's something to it or is it just an easy thing for what the kids that dress in black like or?
Jason Soles: I don't like it.
But, OK, that's a good question.
I think it is kind of a meaningless term, like “horror”. Art should evoke emotion. It should evoke a response, and I think a lot of art, if not most good art, is dark. And if you're not being questioned and questioning what you're looking at, if it's not provoking thought, it's not doing its job. If you're just creating art for the sake of it being dark, you've missed the point. So I'm not a fan of dark art per se, although I realize that for many my work often falls into that category.
Marc17: Do you have any advice for aspiring professional artists or artists that wish to become professional? Or at least solo work.
Jason Soles: Stick to your vision and work hard. Develop your skills.
Do not get bogged down by failure or if something isn't matching or living up to your vision. Everything's an experience and you learn more from doing than not doing. Even if you're not happy with the piece, the next piece will be better. Constantly develop, constantly sharpen, and constantly keep working. I'm a big believer in practicing your craft until it's perfected.
I spent COVID with a kind of a monastic attitude. I spent most of my free time in one room practicing my craft day after day. And I mean, I would sand and smooth and polish to perfection. I still go back to those pieces all the time.
That was the only time in my adult life I have had that much free time to focus exclusively on craft, and I kind of miss it. And suddenly the world opens back up and you have to produce and you have to manufacture and get the pieces to sell. And it's not quite the same thing anymore. The audience is different and actually being able to step outside that room really kind of focuses you on the here and now rather than on that continual practice.
My best advice is to stick to it and think about your work in the long term and refine it, refine it, refine it, refine it.
Tumulus 2026
Photo: Jason Soles