The Seed
Klien Goousseff* says Berlin changed his life. “I’m a French guy, and I lived most of my younger years alone with my mother since my father passed [away] from cancer when I was really young,” he said in an interview with Loud Thoughts. “I was used to moving a lot but really changing from country to country was a big thing and discovering Berlin was another big thing because there was really this freedom culture.”
At the age of 14, his mother landed a position as a Historian at an international research center in Germany, prompting a relocation from Paris to Berlin. This new culture and perspective created a philosophy of life that would enter creative realms for Goousseff. As a teenager in Berlin, he was finally able to participate in city life—not merely exist within it.
“There were just more places and less people than [in] Paris. Everything was cheaper and you could smoke weed in public without getting in so much trouble,” he said. “What I love is just that we live so close to each other; we are forced to experience each other’s culture.”
Goousseff, who has seen Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia and Argentina, loves the study of history like his mother. He still remembers the exact moment he began drawing. “I was 16 or 17 and my mother’s friend’s daughter was visiting us,” he said. “She was drawing and I kind of fell in love with her but she was just there for five days,” he said.
They quickly became friends, writing each other letters from France to Germany. “She would send me drawings you know, with the letters and so I would send drawings too and that’s how I began to draw really.”
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In college, he studied history and his technique further developed at Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, an incredibly selective art school in the region. “I had another friend visiting in Germany who saw my drawings and as I came back to Paris, she brought me to the art school,” he said. “Even though I wasn’t legally a student, I would go to the nude fest; they had a lot of models and it was like eight hours a week.
“I went there for maybe two or three years and it gives you a solid background because human bodies are a really good basis as it’s academic,” he said. “What is funny is you draw someone naked for four hours and then as they leave the scene and say goodbye to get their clothes on, you feel some kind of shyness and really like ‘oh…I’m so sorry!’”
Goousseff always carried a sketch pad with him. “I would draw every time I was moving: in the subway, in Les Beaux-Arts, in the parties also,” he said. “There was a time in my life where I would consider it a bad week if I didn’t draw 20-30 hours a week.”
Studying in France came with many perks, including the fact that police did not have the authority to enter student grounds. “Any campus is a safe haven for smokers,” he said. “I would go there twice a week and meet with students, do parties, smoke joints and draw a lot.”
His style started to take root and years later, around 2020, he switched his subject matter completely. “I started off doing landscapes from memory and then adding cannabis wasn’t really hard and it was also for me, after the lockdown, a free way to travel,” he said. “As I get across a lot of things, I think we can’t travel everywhere if we want to sync up with the planet…with war right now it’s really difficult to cross let’s say Ukraine, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, other places.”
“Staying with the same subject; it limits all the questions you have as an artist. The plant is an infinite fractal structure as you look at it—like it’s always the same thing only smaller and smaller. You’ve got these nine panel leaves and then 7-5-3-1. It’s this fascination you can have with symmetry, dissymmetry and things you find in cannabis.”
“As a drawer when you are high, it’s really great to draw it. You can’t really miss yourself because if you just follow the structure, it gives you all the answers and then you are committed to yourself…Between this really botanical approach and this really psychedelic approach, I think there is something other than the photo-realistic approach and my approach is also questioning where our mind can go and whether or not we need the AI.”
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Goousseff’s likes to quite literally get inside the mind of each plant he is drawing. “You have to think, is the plant happy? Is it well fed? Isn’t she too hot? What’s moisture content? How is she feeling? So it’s not just like drawing something, expressing colors and forms is also an incarnation of a body even though it’s just a plant,” he said. “They are what they are even though they might not be conscious, they just are.”
The Flower
As a cannabis grower, processor, aficionado and artist, Goousseff has started to collaborate with events, brands and businesses across the globe. In Thailand, where 4,000 cannabis prisoners were recently released, the 1st Ganja Cup has been running since May. It was started by Prempavee in an effort to spread awareness about locally-grown cannabis products. The event is currently on tournament 7, with over 350 growers and 21 judges participating each month. “Goousseff is very nice, I like his drawings and after chatting with him we came out with the idea to make the logo for the Cup by hand,” Prempavee said.
Aside from doing commissions for other French cannabis brands, he has designed merchandise for exotic cannabis cultivator, Captain Nemo Cannabis. Operating out of Fort Collins, Colorado, the company is on a mission to grow rare plants and help animals along the way. Last Thanksgiving, they raised $240 for the SPCA. “The next strain that I’m most excited about is White Christmas. It is a cross between ’79 Christmas Dooligah, a large leafed expression of the Australia Bastard Cannabis (ABC) variety from Binchickenspicks and The White x ABC, a high terpene variety with a legendary high from Humboldt CSI and Painted Forest. Because they both carry the ABC leaf type gene, I’m hoping to isolate the vigor and shape of the 79 Christmas Dooligah, while upping the cannabinoids and enhancing the flavor in the final product. This will also be the subject of our second hoodie project,” Nemo said. “Highlighting the obscurity of the ABC leaf type is something that I believe Goousseff will be able to do with great talent. This project is expected to be released in July of 2024.”
“The creative process with Goousseff has been collaborative and exciting. We are creating two projects that will be printed on hoodies…The bold imagery of the plants in a field gave the hoodies a feeling of life that was missing.”
**For the publication of this story, the identity of the individual is deliberately concealed to ensure privacy and confidentiality. This measure creates a candid exploration of the narrative while respecting the subject’s need for anonymity.**
To support Klien Goousseff and view more of his new work, go to ko-fi.com/cannartoon
About the author
Jack Porcari
Founder, Loud Thoughts
Jack Porcari is a patient advocate, writer, and musician from the vibrant city of Buffalo, New York. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a certificate in journalism from the State University of New York at Buffalo. As founder of Loud Thoughts, a pioneering cannabis media company, he helps people of all backgrounds understand the relevance of cannabis in the modern world.