When I was in college I used to write letters to my close friends. I would give the letters by hand and watch my friends while reading them. If they giggled I was the happiest person. I dedicated my entire creativity to these letters. Later I started drawing my letters. I even made little comic books for my friends.

When I moved to the States at age 27, I drew about my first 10 days in the States and my friends enjoyed it a lot. A couple years later I decided to make a comic everyday and post it on a web site and that would be my drawn letter to my friends.

I had some English speaking friends in the States by then and most of my Turkish friends speak English, so I decided to make the comics in English. When many people whom I don’t know started reading Ordinary Things I was surprised.

I now have readers all over the world but mostly from the United States, Turkey, Brazil, and the UK. Since I started making Ordinary Things in 2006 I have been drawing in English. I can only speak Turkish and English. Maybe one day I may make comics in a made up language.

Before I came to the States I used to draw for a weekly humor magazine in Turkey. There is a big humor magazine tradition in Turkey. I had the habit of drawing 4 frames every week.

When I quit working for the magazine I didn’t want that habit to die. I wondered if I could draw one image everyday for a year. I tested that thought by making Ordinary Things. After the first year I increased the time I spend for each image and I began posting 3-4 images per week.

My other motivation was to make an autobiographical graphic novel. It was this perfect idea in my mind and I was never able to get started for fear of spoiling the perfection.

I decided to make something less serious just making one image everyday for finding the best aesthetic I could use for my book. It worked!

I discovered many things in those 6 years and I am using them in my autobiographical graphic novel, Dare to Disappoint, which will be released in 2013 or early 2014 from Farrar Straus Giroux.

When you do something you love it does not feel like work and you end up working all the time but it feels like playing all the time. I love all the things I do. It is good and bad.

I have wonderful time while working but there are endless deadlines in my mind that I can never catch. Sometimes work becomes like a fight. Sometimes it becomes an escape.

Once I asked a friend, “Am I compulsive?” and she said “If you ask that to someone who loves you they will say you are passionate. If you ask someone who does not like you, they will say you are compulsive.”

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Artist, husband, father and friend, Brett Walker is also a Mission hipster icon as one of Four Barrel’s most easily recognized baristas. He can sling shots of espresso from behind the counter while carrying on two simultaneous in-depth conversations on art or food or bicycle mechanics, while giving his daughter, Elanor, a kiss as her mother stands her up on the counter to say hello, while nodding to various other customers and receiving gifts of homegrown eggs or produce, or some other amazing little homemade object his customers gift upon him.

Walker balances his multiple identities in one seamless flow as part of his art-making practice, where he captures the cacophony of his daily life, between riding his bicycle from the outer Sunset to work in the café in the Mission, or to Berkeley, sitting stoic through crits from fellow MFA students, and all the while capturing his life in immediate and instantaneous ways.

Over the years Walker’s art has included videos, sculptures, installations and photography, and his current work is about the immediacy of capturing life as it is happening, more than any specific medium or subject matter. The honesty in his pursuit is captured in his comprehensive final graduation show, on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through June 10, titled “Getting the Big Picture,” which encapsulates photographic imagery, a work table, a broken disco ball, shelves and a self-modeled piñata. That several of the images are taken by his friends and family reflects Brett’s reluctance towards a constraining formal body of art, and shows that the practice of capturing life as it happens is all a part of the whole.

***

The Rumpus: How would you say your art-making began?

Brett Walker: I had always desired to “do something.” Growing up much of what I was exposed to seemed passive; the environment I came from and the activities that many people I encountered participated in only seemed to reinforce that passivity. I definitely wanted to challenge and add to the cultural landscape. I don’t think I understood this then as I do now, but from an early age I always drew and wanted to draw well. The idea of the artist was really appealing to me, but at the time I understood art-making as something that was much more concerned with a sense of skill and technical accomplishment. I don’t feel like I’ve ever had any proper skill as an artist, at least not in the classic sense. But I drew and as I got older I played music, piano and guitar and I played in really bad bands in high school. We recorded music and played shows around town. It was all really cute. I also wrote on the newspaper in high school and participated in theatre, skateboarded and went to rock shows. The usual stuff. And I of course made pictures. But it really wasn’t till I was about 20 or so, when I was going to school in Seattle doing commercial photography that I learned that there was something greater out there than what I had been exposed to before.

Rumpus: Tell me about your relationship to photography as a practice, and how your relationship with the idea of a formal body of work has changed, and ultimately allowed you more freedom to express yourself.

Walker: I initially came to make photographs through an interest stirred by how my family made pictures in the domestic setting. This wasn’t “making pictures” as a conscious act, it was just something my family, and many other families, did to document existence, to create records of travels and moments in time. Most importantly in this photographic discovery was my grandfather, Big Al, who was by most accounts an “amateur” photographer whose day job was as a business exec. I never got to fully talk photography with my Grandpa Big Al before he died, but he was always making pictures of things, and though he may not have thought of it as anything other than records of family life, his thousands of Kodachrome slides tell a different sort of story.

I had a hard time in photo school, of making sense of how one develops and finishes a body of work. I encountered a lot of rules that I didn’t agree with and that didn’t jive with how I understood the photograph. Things about formal bodies of work, where they begin and end, who the artist actually is, how a photo should look, technical things like focus and exposure, tack-sharp corners, sequencing and presentation. When I was in school in Seattle way back in the day, I presented some photographs to one of my instructors, he took one look at them and asked me what kind of camera I was shooting on. When I told him I was using a Hasselblad, he angrily told me, “Then make pictures that look like they were shot on a Hasselblad,” and tossed the prints back in my lap. I had a lot of similar moments like that all through my early schooling.

I think part of why I struggled making sense of photography during my first rounds of college was because what I was being exposed to and taught was in stark contrast to what I had learned at home, from just making pictures on a 35mm camera and having them processed into 4×6’s at the one-hour lab and then stuck in a photo album that sat on our coffee table.

Rumpus: How much is parenting a part of your practice? Or are there disparate parts of Brett Walker? Do you think about the art you’re making now, and how Elanor may interpret it later?

Walker: I am always thinking about what I am doing with regard to Elanor and my wife Kathleen. I worry more about Elanor having to live with this weird sort of archive I am creating. I believe Harry Callahan stopped making photographs of his daughter after a certain point; I think she just didn’t want to participate anymore, and I totally anticipate that happening with Elanor. I also think that the kind of work I could potentially make with her when she is 12 or 13 would be very different from the work now.

As far as the practice, I think there is something about parenting, but also just kids in general, how they learn and what seems totally natural to them, which plays a huge part in my work and thinking. For instance, we have this old wooden train set, and one day Elanor was playing with the tracks out in our living room and I went in to join her. I sat down and was watching her lay out the tracks. There is this one bridge section that has two ramps that lead up to this high bridge-like section. She had the two ramps assembled backwards so they essentially created a half pipe sort of shape. I immediately began to correct her and to try and show her how the pieces were actually meant to be assembled but suddenly caught myself and realized that there was absolutely no reason in the world why the tracks couldn’t have been assembled as she had done, and that it was only my prior knowledge of the train track set and how it should be constructed that was determining that what Elanor was doing was wrong.

Rumpus: You have several photos in your exhibit that were taken by other people, which completely dismantles the notion of the photographer as The Artist. Can you discuss how your daughter’s photos factor in to your practice? And other people’s photos?

Walker: This project has really become about making pictures, and figuring out what that means in an age of camera phones, ultra-affordable, compact, high-resolution cameras and photo sharing social media such as Twitter and Instagram and such. I was about to say “I had to relearn,” but as I think back on it, I don’t think I ever learned how to take pictures when I was in photo school to begin with, and rather what I learned in photo school only served to confuse and disrupt the natural method of picture making that I had learned just from being aware of the camera in the domestic setting growing up. I naively allowed school to teach me that the artist was the one making the photograph, but this negated the fact that the photo album sitting on my parents’ coffee table was full of pictures made by many different people. As I have come to learn and define a process of photography that works well for me, it has become important to consider and include the photographs of others and their relation to the work I am making.

Rumpus: Can you talk a little bit about the trust aspect in your work, how the people in your life and you photos implicitly trust you, and therefore are willing to partake in your artmaking endeavors. You’ve mentioned that you would never ask anyone to do something for a photo that you yourself were not willing to do. How is this relevant in your experience of making “The Colleagues”–taking the antique sledgehammer and getting not only your friends and fellow cafe workers to take their shirts off and join you barefoot in the alley, but also customers were willing to jump in and be a part of your world/work?

Walker: I have asked this sort of question to a variety of people over the course of the last couple weeks, and have received a variety of answers. The one that stuck out to me the most was from my friend Bob who was originally a customer of mine at Four Barrel and is now a friend and participant in “The Colleagues,” which I made this past winter. Bob told me that I seem to have an ability to get people to do things that they may not have considered doing or been comfortable doing in the past.

As for exactly how I am able to do that, I am not entirely sure, trust or otherwise. I do feel blessed beyond belief to have such an amazing and diverse community of people around me who are willing to help create this weird sort of communal and cultural landscape. I am hesitant to even say it’s created, as I really feel like it’s a much more organic and unintentional act and I believe it’s less about trust, and more about a community of creative-minded people. I feel like at some point or another I have collaborated with all these people, either collectively or individually. We all have somewhat similar goals and desires and I think also an understanding of the communal environment that we all live within.

“The Colleagues” is a great example of this. Every person in that photograph I have engaged with in some sort of creative capacity outside of my own art. Additionally, with the exception of two people, all of those people have been inside my home and to some extent are pretty close friends of the family. I understand the aspect of trust, I believe, but I feel like trust is just par for the course when one builds a community around them of like-minded people.

Rumpus: How important is teaching to you? How has your experience at Berkeley getting your MFA the past few years evolved you as an artist?

Walker: Teaching is 100 percent important and valuable to me, and the one thing that I would like to do more of but am not so sure I know exactly how to do the kind of teaching I would like to do right now. That said, my opinions about teaching have changed drastically since I’ve been in school. I am trying to find a method of teaching, a pedagogy that I believe in and is adaptable to many different teaching situations. I spent the last semester of school teaching an entry-level undergrad art class called Introduction to Visual Thinking. I am going to teach the same class later this summer, and I am super excited to be able to teach the same class back to back, to be able to expand upon the ideas and methods I employed and to try and improve upon some of the parts that I felt were weak or didn’t work as well as I intended. This last semester I gave everyone in my class A’s at the beginning of the semester, and told them that all they had to do to keep the A was to maintain it. I don’t personally feel like I am in any position to judge someone’s artwork as being worth an A or a B or C, and I don’t really see how you would ascribe such a scale to something like art work. Rather I tried to judge their habits and efforts, to look for their struggles and see where they broke through. There were only a couple moments when I felt like students were taking advantage of this system, when their work didn’t display effort and practice.

Rumpus: I think calling the way somebody makes their art “their practice” sounds a little stiff, and simultaneously like it’s not the real game, like one doesn’t know what he is doing. But since we’re talking about “art” it seems appropriate to use it, since in some way your art is all about the making of it; your art IS the practice. You exude a very strong sense of self. Your practice has a self-awareness and sense of maturity that exceeds your years. Do you have any idea why?

Walker: I am pretty skeptical of anyone who uses words like practice, or when someone is talking about their work and they’re like, “My interest is in…” I don’t know if I have any solid reason for my disdain and skepticism, other than maybe I am just jealous of their overtly confident status. I mean, I am totally cocky and confident, but I rarely refer to myself as an artist.

In regards to my own self-awareness, I think part of the answer lies in my work ethic and upbringing. My dad always told me to keep my wits about me, I am not quite sure what he meant at the time, but I think this idea has had a profound shape on my growth as a person and artist. I grew up in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, that had really polar opposite sorts of demographics. There was definitely a contingent of wealthy and affluent kids who played sports and really excelled at school. Lots of big ugly new construction, shitty mansions, kids who were given cars on their 16th birthday, but then there were also kids from families who were less well off, lots of hard working blue collar sorts of families. My father and grandfather owned their own business, so we led a pretty comfortable life, but at the same time, my family was a family of trash haulers, and I spent a large part of my youth hauling garbage and there’s definitely a social stigma that comes with that line of work, but it never really bothered me at all. In fact I think that’s where some of the answer to your question lies. Working for my family like that really helped fill me with a sense of pride in my work, and what I did and how my work affected the rest of my life. When you’re 15 years old and up at 5 in the morning on a garbage truck hauling trash while the rest of your friends are at home in bed, you really begin to understand your place in the world, and it builds inside of you a confidence and pride that is really hard to shake. I think a lot of my friends sort of caught on to it as well, some of them even worked for my father on occasion.

Similarly, fast forward to the present and I am 30 years old and I work in a coffee shop. Most people work in coffee shops as part time jobs while they go to school, or because they’re lazy and have no aspirations in life. Granted, the café I happen to work in is a slightly different example, but I have absolutely no problems working in that environment and take full ownership and pride of my career. Every so often I am at a dinner party or some weird social event, and I am in the company of people with “actual” jobs or careers. Every so often I catch a hint of disdain, or scorn, when after informing me of their stellar job, I inform them that I work in a coffee shop. People always seem to have more problems with my own life than I do myself.

Rumpus: Are there times your execution trumps your original intention?

Walker: You always have to put the work before your own desires.

Rumpus: In your own words, talk about influences on your art and practice, and what other artists you have respect for, and why those particular folks come up in your thoughts and ideas about art making.

Walker: The other night Kathleen and I were having a discussion with some friends about television shows worth watching, and Kathleen was explaining how since I was now done with grad school we could finish watching the X-Files. Our friend was a little shocked that we were such X-File nerds and Kathleen replied that the X-Files were definitely part of Walker lore.

I have been thinking about this idea of lore the last couple days and I think it’s really a rather poetic way to talk about influences. It actually makes me think a lot about my family and growing up, as I feel I came from a family that had a lot of lore. My mom’s side of the family, my uncles and my Grandpa Big Al, were fascinated by these tragic public cultural figures. I remember watching documentaries on JFK with all of them on family vacations. Apparently my Grandpa Big Al drove hundreds of miles out of the way on a family vacation to photograph the farm house were the Clutter family was murdered, from In Cold Blood. He was obsessed with that story; however, I have never been able to find the pictures he made of the house. Similarly, you couldn’t peel them away from the OJ Simpson trial. Maybe these things are more family legend than lore, but these things have had much more of a lasting effect on me than any artist or artwork ever has.

To be totally honest, I am not really one to pay attention to and get really excited about much artwork that I come across out in the world. I actually feel really guilty sometimes because I have a much more visceral reaction to things like books and movies and music, than I do to Art with a capital A.

I actually think a lot of my artistic sensibilities were sort of acquired or self taught just through going to movies. I saw a Stan Brakhage screening at the University of Washington once that really opened my mind up to the idea that I too could make movies. I didn’t actually make any moving image works until I was like 21 or 22, much later than when I had started making still photographs. It wasn’t until I was half way done with art school in Maine that I actually started making short films and video works. I shot a movie in France the summer after I finished under grad; Kathleen had gotten a job as a translator for a student trip, and I forced one of the students into running a camera for me, filming some basic actions and movements. That same trip I saw a Godard retrospective at the Pompidou that just blew my mind. He had video iPods zip tied to model trains, moving all about the museum, there were televisions laying on their back showing pornos. It was wild, far crazier than anything I had experienced up to that point, and I had seen a fair bit of his movies too, of course; in fact we watched all sorts of French New Wave in Seattle, but this was all in the theatre. To see something like this in a museum just really changed the way I was thinking about the kind of work I could make.

I’ve always read a lot, and really prefer simple, shorter works. The Dave Hickey collection Air Guitar really moved me, as did much of the writing on food by John Thorne. I read Raymond Carver a ton when I was younger, I even got to meet his widow once on Valentine’s Day. I love short, simple written pieces that are full of intelligence. The Barthes collection Mythologies was always really important to me. Often times if you have steak dinner at the Walker house, depending on how much wine I have consumed I may start the meal by reading his essay on Steak and Chips. I am only realizing now the influence Barthes has had on me, yet I don’t think I am fully able to understand it just yet.

Often times people want a really straightforward, easy explanation as to where certain photographs come from or what they mean, and in all honesty, it’s near impossible to locate that one source. That’s why I feel like the idea of lore is more appropriate. It makes things less tangible and more mythical.

Brett’s show “Getting the Big Picture” is on exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum through June 10. This fall he will be included in an exhibit entitled “The Kids Are All Right” at the Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. You can find more of Brett’s work at his website: http://www.everybodydoesntlikebrettwalker.com

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How can you not love serious artists that don’t take themselves too seriously, and that admit to Mad Magazine, UFOs, Stephen King and 60s & 70s TV as their influences?

“Cartoons involve violence, misogyny, insensitivity to marginal people of all sorts. And it is sort of culturally okay in the cartoon arena. I think our work pushed back against the dogma of political correctness and took a snarky free speech stance sometimes. All my favorite jokes are sexually transgressive, aren’t yours?” – Tag Team

Tag Team is the collaborative effort of sculptor, Walter Robinson, and painter, Tim Sharman, both well-respected gallery artists in their own right. The duo met 15 years ago and discovered a mutual affinity for each other’s work and sense of humor and decided to embark on an exploratory body of work together, different from their solo pursuits. One of them would start a piece of art and mail it to the other, who would respond then mail it back. Many of the drawings were passed back and forth several times, and over the course of ten years Tag Team produced over 300 drawings.

The process allowed them the anonymity and freedom to play with deviant topics and cartoonishly disturbing imagery. Though both men are in at least their fifth decade, the night I met them at the opening of their current show at Madrone Art Bar in the trendy NOPA neighborhood of San Francisco, they were cracking each other up with crass inside jokes like two geeky teenagers. Happily pointing out the pornographic section of the show with huge grins on their faces, they said the only off-limit subjects were Jesus and blow-jobs.

The show inspires multiple viewings. Madrone is plastered with 100s of unframed drawings, pinned salon-style to the gallery wall. Each of the pieces are dense with color, layers of imagery and inside jokes, and with so much to take in, even the bartenders and gallery owner say they still see something new every time they look. Both Walter and Tim were entertained when I dubbed my favorite drawing Big Balled Bats. From a distance, childlike V-shaped birds in a yellow-green sky look like flies, or bats with huge breasts, until upon closer inspection one sees that the breasts are actually huge hairy balls.

To honor the spirit of Tag Team, I interviewed Walter and Tim separately, but assigned only the names TT1 and TT2 to their answers, to give the reader a sense of the individual artists while mirroring their mashup as one collaborative response. They did not see each other’s answers.

Their current exhibition, The Art of Tag Team, is on display at Madrone Art Bar (500 Divisadero St., San Francisco), through November, and includes over 200 mixed-media drawings. Most are available at the very buyer-friendly “we are the 99%” price of $99 so that you can get one for yourself and one for your brother or your best friend.

Rumpus: Tell me about the night you two first met and hatched the idea of Tag Team. Explain how the process works.

TT1: I met Walter at an opening of mine in San Francisco in 1996. I was showing a series of cartoonish nudes and portraits along with the artwork of a mutual friend of Walter’s and I. Walter bought two watercolors out of the show and as we talked we discovered we were liking a lot of the same art stuff. After the exhibition, Walter invited me to his house. He was getting rid of some materials that he thought I would be interested in and I got to see his artwork for the first time and I was looking at an artist that almost resembled me. Afterwards we decided to start sending drawings to one another.

TT2: I was introduced to Tim when he had a show of paintings with a mutual friend. I bought 4 of his drawings, so I appreciated his work. I got in touch with him and offered him some panels to paint on and we began to talk. We found we had a lot in common and hatched the idea of a drawing collaboration through the mail. In the beginning we each started works on 8×12 paper and sent them back and forth.

Rumpus: After starting the collaborative process, did you ever have buyer’s remorse, thinking, Shit, what did I just commit to?

TT1: Nope.

TT2: Not at all. It was exciting to see what came back. And I felt compelled to create a great response.

Rumpus: Were there any rules you started out with, or that have developed while working on pieces? And if rules is too harsh a word, maybe what are some of the guidelines you use in Tag Team?

TT1: The only rules we had with the drawings done for the mail was these: No oil paints and that the drawings would all be 9 x 12”, to fit into a manila envelope.

TT2: The only restrictions were materials that didn’t dry fast, so no oil paint. The subject matter developed organically as we learned visually what our cultural references were.

Rumpus: What’s the minimal amount of work one turn would take? A squiggle, an entire scene, a background? Were there any pieces you decided not to add to?

TT1: It all depended on the drawing at hand. Every one took on a life of it’s own and we would tend it to the best of our abilities. Sometimes the drawing had too very little effort to guide it to maturity; some of the drawings wilted and became static. When we first started, we would decide that if a drawing became impossible to finish we would tear it up. Later we did a more humane thing and gessoed over it, making the image a layer for another image.

TT2: We added whatever it took to push the narrative. Sometimes we added characters, a background, a formal abstract pattern. In the beginning we set each other up more consciously, eliciting a response or laying down a challenge to outdo our addition. Not in a competitive way, but to push each other further. It wasn’t until we got to know each other that we felt like we could leave a first effort alone. This didn’t happen too often.

Rumpus: How many times would one work go back and forth between you?

TT1: We gave each other the right to deem a drawing done without the consent of the other, so a drawing would be mailed back and forth until one of us would put it in our done file. If the drawing got mailed back and forth for a while and no one said it was finished, we would gesso over it.

TT2: Each piece was different – sometimes we would each do one round, sometimes up to 3 or 4.

Rumpus: Do you feel possessive about what aspects/drawings/parts are yours in each artwork? Are you willing to say what parts of a drawing you are responsible for, or is keeping some sort of anonymity part of the fun?

TT1: Why spoil the fun. We made the drawings as a combined entity. In this collaboration, there is no this is my contribution, that is his contribution. We feel we can claim each other’s contribution as our own.

TT2: I am not concerned with anonymity. We can usually pick out our contributions. Each of us has strong points which we came to recognize, so a default pattern developed to some extent. For example: backgrounds/environments and transgressive characters/situations were two big departments. There are things I am proud of doing myself, but the real reward is in the mélange.

Rumpus: How different was the experience for you of either starting a piece, or responding off of a drawing that came to you? Did a drawing ever stump you? What’s the longest time you sat on a drawing, or are there still some sitting in your studio waiting for your turn?

TT1: I myself, would get excited when I saw the package of drawings would arrive in the mail. First I wanted to see how Walter reacted to the previously sent drawings and the new drawings that he started. His contributions would always inspire me to know what to add or subtract. Of course there is always the dud drawing, that starts out bad and just gets stinky, that’s when we would decide on a gesso rejuvenation bath to start afresh. Both Walter and I have drawings that were left unfinished when finally our life schedules became increasingly busy and time for Tag Team faded away.

TT2: Starting a drawing was pretty open-ended and was a chance to use ideas or materials that were currently of interest to me. Responding was more of a challenge sometimes. There were conceptual as well as formal problems to solve. Occasionally we discussed these problems and that directed solutions. Either way, it seemed to be easy to go at it with wide-open intuition. Sometimes a drawing was less inspiring, and took longer to respond to, and sometimes we maybe decided to accept it as an undernourished whole, or we cannibalized passages from it to collage into new pieces. We just moved on to the more inspiring ones, of which there were plenty. There are still unfinished parts around.

Rumpus: Did you ever ask for one back because later on you decided it wasn’t finished?

TT1: It’s possible that happened, but I don’t recall ever asking to do more on a drawing once one of us declared it finished.

TT2: I don’t think so. But we never regarded them as so precious that they could not be altered at a later point.

Rumpus: Did you ever feel like you ruined what the other person made?

TT1: All the time. Sometimes a drawing would come to me so perfect that I was afraid to add anything, thinking I couldn’t match it artistically. That was when we decided that even one of us could do a drawing and by one of us declaring it done, it became a Tag Team Drawing.

TT2: Not really. I hope he feels the same. I guess if you don’t want to mess up, you should work alone.

Rumpus: Tell me how these collaborative pieces differ from the other work you do, and the other work you are known for?

TT1: It doesn’t differ too much from the way I make my own work. Working with someone else just expands the artistic playing field for me.

TT2: I am known as a sculptor. This work is detail oriented and involves careful planning and big investments of time for each piece. A piece might start intuitively, but there is a lot of conscious consideration in actualizing something in three dimensions. Tag Team was a chance to just throw it out there without fear of failure. There were so many points of entry, that it wasn’t a big effort to plug into something.

Rumpus: How does your relationship with the collaborations differ from your seriousness or expectations of your other solo work? What does working on this project do for you?

TT1: I view doing the collaborations as an extension of my artistic output, so I put serious artistic thinking into it as I would any of my projects. And just like all my projects I also place a high priority on having fun.

TT2: My solo work also takes into account what the body of work is about in a bigger sense – how the objects may inter-relate conceptually in the context of an installation, and what kind of physical presence they embody. It is more philosophical. It is also about making shit with my hands – this is sort of a sacred relationship that I have with the world. Drawing allows for another kind of relationship with the world. For me personally, Tag Team was not a place to self-edit and try and control things. So in a way, Tag Team was more like going on a journey and not caring where you are going. My sculptural work has a map.

Rumpus: What did you learn about the other person while making these drawings together?

TT1: I learned to trust another artist to save a drawing from the horrible disfigurement that I inflicted on it.

TT2: Lots of things. Personality, values, work ethic. How his brain worked and how he perceived the world. It allowed me to see someone else’s “gift” up close and personal. We both grew up in the bay area and it was interesting to find similar experiences and influences.

Rumpus: Did you allow yourself to experiment with media or tools that you normally don’t use often, or might not consider yourself proficient with? What is the range of media you used in this collaborative series?

TT1: Aside from the drawings, which uses the usual suspects of art media, we have tried our hand at giant paper origami, cut paper flowers and creating puppets and sculpture out of paper and tape. We had almost mastered the twenty-minute double portrait and we tried our hand at a time-lapse video. I’d say we pushed ourselves a little.

TT2: For me, not really being a painter, I learned a lot of new things: gouache, mixing colors, brushes. We used watercolor, inks, acrylic paint, spray paint, gouache, pencil, collage. Later we made some more sculptural pieces that involved hand made frames and assemblage, as well as puppets and big origami.

Rumpus: There is some real playfulness, and in some ways, coming-of-age themes in the imagery. What is your history with cartoons & comics, and who do you see as influence in the work?

TT1: I read and drew comics (all forms) as a kid and I still do. Superheroes, Bugs Bunny, Big Foot, UFOs, ghosts, Monsters, puppets, models, and hours and hours of TV sitcoms, Twilight Zone and reading Stephen King. (I will admit that). As for artistic influences, everybody!

TT2: We both grew up with Mad Magazine and comic books and early TV. Most of the Mad artists were influences – Basil Wolverton for sure. My parents limited my access to low culture more. Tim has an encyclopedic memory of 60’s and 70’s TV and comics. I absorbed the stuff less directly: sarcastic humor and irony were just in the air. It was a posture that made living under a nuclear cloud a little bit sunnier.

Rumpus: Was there any topic/subject/image taboo?

TT1: If there were, we placed them on ourselves, not collectively.

TT2: When 2 guys meet, humor, power, slang, sexuality become convenient tools to break the ice with. You figure out what the other person’s limits are. I think it was hard setting the bar too low. But on the other hand, I think we are both compassionate and thoughtful guys and didn’t want to discomfort viewers too much. Honestly, I remember discussing this a couple of times and drawing the line at blowjobs and Jesus.

Rumpus: Were you ever shocked by the drawing you received, or were there times that you intentionally upped the ante to see what the other person would respond with?

TT1: All the time.

TT2: I may have been shocked by the beauty of it or strangeness. Morally, I think I may have shocked him more. I think we both upped the ante to push the other person a lot.

Rumpus: In the show there is an area you called the “pornographic” section, but I saw plenty of drawings dispersed throughout the entire spread that could probably fall into that category. Can you talk about some of the other recurring themes in the work and what they meant to you. For example: creepy elves, pig-people, Disney characters, big-butted Crumb girls, bare tits and you could say, women in repose, or maybe juxtaposed into compromising positions? I’d also be happy to hear about other recurring elements of textures and patterns and materials.

TT1: As for the stuff we draw, we both are able through certain mental exercises, to think like 13-year-old boys.

TT2: We did a series for a show we called Neurotica that were deliberately sexually titillating or transgressive. This was always a theme, but this show focused on it consciously. Cartoons involve violence, misogyny, insensitivity to marginal people of all sorts. And it is sort of culturally okay in the cartoon arena. I think our work pushed back against the dogma of political correctness and took a snarky free speech stance sometimes. All my favorite jokes are sexually transgressive, aren’t yours? As far as formal elements, we sometimes borrowed styles from other painters or street art that had currently interested us.

Rumpus: There definitely seems to be a dialog in the drawings, sometimes almost a call-and-response. Are there inside jokes in the art? Or a hidden language in the imagery?

TT1: Laced with them. I couldn’t tell you what they are now, but I remember putting a lot of that stuff in. The way we composed our drawings was always an invitation to respond to what we placed there, imagery-wise and also text-wise. We had a game going where a word would appear on the drawing and another word would appear next to it, creating a phrase some times.

TT2: I don’t think anything is secret or hidden in a coded way. This is everyone’s culture.

Rumpus: My husband is an artist and he talks about how a drawing can bring back detailed memories of the day he made it, as if everything that was going on at that time is caught in the work, that the drawing serves as a visual memory trigger for that moment in time. Are phases of your lives encapsulated in the images or recurring themes?

TT1: Phases of our lives encapsulated in the drawings? Maybe, if there are they were placed there by my subconscious.

TT2: I get that phenomena more when I really get into a zone on one piece which involves deeper concentration and longer periods of time. So this happens with my solo work a lot. When Tag Team worked on drawings together at the same location, I have memories of those occasions and things we talked about or did. There was usually a lot of banter and joking about what we were working on. We made so many drawings that in retrospect I can’t recall specific moments so much, but I can roughly identify which phase of the project something came from. I can remember things I was going through personally at certain periods, and in retrospect some of the imagery could be symptomatic of those parts of my life.

Rumpus: If so, could you read, almost as a second secret language, what was going on in the life of the other team member by what was coming through in the imagery?

TT1: Interesting Questions. I only knew when Walter had a lot of free time on his hands because the drawing package would be loaded with drawings. When he was busy, there was just a few. Sometimes you get an inkling by certain images, but what the heck, we are always working out our problems in our art right? Right?

TT2: I feel like this work was not as deeply cathartic as my solo work. It was sort of an explosion of everything that had been absorbed into my subconscious. Maybe you could look at each piece of shrapnel and try and analyze it, but there is just too many pieces. Just like there is too much visual information in our lives now to bother looking deeper into the meaning of each piece. I can’t really read in the work what Tim was going through at the time either. I think Tag Team was a place to escape what was going on in our lives. Maybe this is something guys do.

Rumpus: How did you feel about collaboration before you started working on this together? How do you feel about it now?

TT1: I have been involved with different forms of artistic collaboration many times dating back to grade school. With Walter, I found the perfect partner in crime. We had a blast.

TT2: I had never collaborated with anyone else, but was aware of a few other collaborations. I had never imagined doing it, but the right person appeared at the right time. In the beginning it was exhilarating. To work with someone else that shared my outlook and delivered at a level that was challenging and proficient was exciting. Later on when we started doing portrait-painting performances, it became more like work and less “fun”. But in retrospect, we cranked out a lot of entertaining work and created something unique. It takes a certain kind of ego/personality to do this. A lot of collaborations don’t last as long as ours. People’s lives change, and the amount of time available to put into it changes. It is sort of like being in a band – and most of them run their course. I would recommend it to anyone.

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She was an only child, raised in DC by older over-bearing parents. She married the first man she dated, and at 21 joined him in his rural Oklahoma Episcopal parish. He died from skin cancer six years later, leaving her a widow at age 28 with three kids, no education, and no prospect of a career. She never remarried. After her children were grown, she went back to school and started writing poetry, and began a journey of self-discovery. She didn’t get very far, breast cancer ended her life when she was 53.

I have the collection of journals she kept over her last 8 years. I never would have touched them while she was alive. Recently, I have started asking her questions, then going to the journals and randomly opening up to a page to look for a reply. I decided to conduct an interview of her in the same fashion. Her replies are transcribed direct from her journals.

Joen Madonna: After us kids moved out, you started searching for who you were and went to stay at a friend’s cabin in Virginia to begin your first novel. What did you discover?

Cherry Crawley: I am a near 50ish woman in search of herself in an apple orchard in the Blue Ridge Mountains of VA. I’ve been lost wherever I’ve been so it makes just as much sense to begin here as in OK. Besides, there are too many of my children in OK. They are part of the shield that keeps me lost. I caught a glimpse of myself while they were gone. I became lost – disappeared at 2 when my mother threw my doll down the stairs, crushing her head. I began emerging at 45 after the third and last child left home. I was doing fine until they all returned. Somehow I get lost in the family I created. I was lost in the family my parents created as well. It’s frightening to think I can only find myself if alone. I hope who I am likes being alone.

Madonna: We never talked about your death while you were dying. I was scared shitless. What was it like for you, dying of breast cancer at age 53?

Crawley: I just really don’t know what to say. This health experience has shed new light on my life. I’m making some changes and they are for the best. I like myself more now, even enjoy myself some. What do you do the day your hair falls out? You buy a sports car you have always wanted, that’s what you do. I wonder if I’ll ever make love again – I love it so much I hate to think not. Will my whole body itch as the hair grows back? My eyes are moist almost all the time – my nose runs a lot.

Madonna: Do you have any departing thoughts about yourself or your self-discovery?

Crawley: I had moments of beauty, but I never knew it. I had glimpses at times, but never full recognition. As a woman becoming older, I was saddened by my lack of understanding about myself. I seemed to always catch on just a little too late. In my forties I realized half was over and that I probably had a better chance at happiness then. Not until my 50s did I realize what could actually have been. I could have had a different life if my attitude hadn’t sucked. My mantra during the 70s & 80s was attitude. Took a long time to take affect. I need to let go of the past and get on with the future. It has taken a toenail, a few teeth and a left breast to get the wake-up call.

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