Ask me cool things
Recent Responses
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Going to places where people are taking real, direct risks to fight the good fight, and then trying to draw that, it bears such a freight of responsibility that it frightens me and excites me at once.
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Thank you so much for the suggestion. I did indeed visit Patio Maravillas, and it was beautiful and quite proper magic. Goyas next trip
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Thank you! It's a calligraphic brush pen, but it's all dry so I dip it in black magic ink
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Well thank you! Fiction: Crimson Petal and the White. Nonfiction: Homage to Catalonia (really all of Orwell's journalism)
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My charge is Disorderly Conduct: Blocking Traffic. However, I just got yanked off of the sidewalk, cuffed, and eleven hours later was slapped with a made up charge. Jail, even a holding cell with your fellow protesters, is awful
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Aww, thank you! I wrote a proposal, years ago, for a book on just that subject. It was rejected all around town for having too niche an audience. Nowadays I'm not really interested in writing it- I have too many of my own art projects!
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Pas de probleme! I used to work at Shakespeare and Company. Amazon is probably your best best for Week in Hell. And I'll be back in Paris in June!
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I am so outside of the legit high art world that I don't even know how to answer that. I never had the option of being a legit fine artist. I don't have the right degrees. I was an illustrator. I look wrong and talk wrong and don't have the right values and don't know the right words to describe my work. I'm grubby and mercantile and terrifically unclassy, and frankly I like it that way.
Everything that I've done with fancy institutions, like throwing events for MoMA, has been because individuals were inspired by what I do.
What I think is this. The fine art world is a tiny niche. It caters to a small sliver of the ultra-rich. It has access to beautiful spaces and buzz and cratefuls of cash. There is no other field of culture so dominated by so few people.
But the world is so much bigger and richer than any ivory tower. Millions more people love art than are being served by the art world. Go find them. -
Nope, sorry. Schedule is a ruin with my paid work, so can't barter for unpaid stuff.
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I wasn't a hard worker as a kid. In fact, I was expelled from school at 12, with the diagnosis "oppositional defiance disorder." In high school, I flunked math classes for handing in tests blank and got suspended for reading books in class. I didn't get accepted to a single academic college.
I work hard because everything in the universe conspires to reduce people to drone zombie-hood, and if you don't want that you have to resist it with all your strength. I work hard because i didn't want a day-job, because I wanted to stop being a low-rent naked model, because I love my life and I have to earn it. I also work hard because I'm lazy and want to wake up at 11 and not wear clothes all day.
No one who knew me growing up would have called me a hard worker. Just a troublemaker. -
While there is certainly talent, its a fairly small part of the equation. Freakish prodigies aside, even talented artistic kids aren't very good at first. God knows I sucked for forever. It's more about having the burning desire, motivation, time, mentors, and environment to take whatever kernel of inborn talent you have and grown it, over the course of years, into something other people might pay for.
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No. I'm not and have never been against rich people or golden glittering things. I make a good living, and have been the house artist for years for The Box, which is an unspeakably swank nightclub. It's been one of the collaborations I've been proudest of.
I am emphatically for working towards a more just world where people can have a decent life, where they're not shot by cops for being black, where they're not one biopsy or broken leg away from destitution. I think it's a testament to how far right America (and the world) has swung that stating this is radical. -
Work hard, make friends, don't give up.
A bit more: be incredibly opportunistic and on the hunt for places that can use your art. Be hard on yourself. Shun all the woo woo vagueness that people tell artists: "fulfilling your dreams", "nurturing your creativity", the whole lot of that. It exists to sell self-help books to dilettantes.
Care about money. You'll need it. If not now, when you're sick or old or have a kid. Never listen to anyone who tries to shame you for caring about money.
Be mercenary with most clients, but be incredibly generous with comrades in arms who inspire you. I still do a considerable amount of cheap or free work, for musician BFFs or Occupy Wall Street. I can do this because I charge alot for my paid work.
Remember that you actually have to make things that people want to buy, and if people don't want to buy them it's not because they're awful philistines. Endeavor to both do better and find your audience.
Generate your own projects that you believe in. Work hard on them. Show them off.
Don't illustrate people's self published children's books for free. Trust me.
Make friends with people who aren't artists, and have interests that aren't art. Hackers, entrepeneurs, journalists, models, construction workers, professors...
Draw all the time. Keep sketchbooks. Go to figure drawing classes. Copy old masters. Be hard on yourself and address your flaws. Find the voice that's yours
Remember that the future belongs to multi-disciplinary mutants, and that a father-figure gallery/agent/manager probably isn't going to swoop down and make you famous while you hole up in your studio and draw all day.
Learn how industries like marketing and the media actually work. It's not hidden knowledge. You can learn to write a press release in five minutes via google.
There's no shame in promoting yourself. No one else will do it for you unless you're already making them money or they're trying to suck up to your dad.
Invest in good equipment and good presentation. Crappy iPhone pics of your work aren't going to get you jobs.
Pay your quarterly taxes. Get an accountant as soon as you can. Freelancers are fucked in America.
Don't spend 150k on an art degree.
Make a cool website.
But most of all: if you want to be an artist for a living, you can't half-ass it. You have to want it more than anything, and be willing to sacrifice sleep, social life, crappy high-school boyfriends, after-work drinks, and pretty much every other trapping of a fun, chill, early twenties experiance.
If you don't want to do this, being a full time artist for you. There's no shame in this. Drawing for fun, because you love it, is a beautiful thing. But if you know that there's nothing else that you can do but make art all day, that it's what you were born for, you're going to need to make sacrifices.
Good luck. -
through much of my early twenties, is was "work, talentless art monkey"
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I'd tell her not to be such a snot and not to be such a scenester, to back the fuck away from big talkers, and to think big herself from the start. There's so much societal training, for women especially, not to think big, and I regret every moment I spent trying to make the adorable and tiny when I could have been plotting things large and deep.
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Me and Fred share a giant, sunny loft of the kind that one scraps hard in New York to eventually get. We each have a wall hung with our art with a drafting table against it, and there's a giant easel that I've been hogging for the big Shell Game paintings. Rest of it is a seldom-cleaned mishmash of champagne corks, photobooth strips, "oriental" rugs, empty absinthe bottles, old wheelchairs, Chinese lanterns, and skulls
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Totally paint in my underwear and Fred's shirts. This is why there are no stop-motion videos of the Hivemind being painted
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I went to Fashion Institute of Technology, but never graduated. It's a terrible school and I'm skeptical of art colleges in general. Creating visual art is a trade, like being a carpenter. Fitting it into the college format is an attempt to fancy-up something blue collar so that universities can make a buck off of it.
I think the best way to learn to make art is a combination of brutal practice, working from instructional books, attending figure drawing classes, finding artist mentors and friends who inspire you and are tough on you, keeping obsessive sketchpads, visiting museums, copying masters, and just drawing drawing drawing until you break.
Yes, this takes motivation, but if you're not self-motivated, being an artist professionally isn't for you anyway. And you haven't gotten 150k in debt to find this out. -
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No prob. Honest. Just send me a picture
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