While cartooning will always be a part of Ariel’s life—she teaches a Graphic Novel Workshop at The New School and collaborates with comedian Kevin Seccia on the recurring webcomic Ariel and Kevin Invade Everything—she’s also been working on her first prose novel, ADAM, which will be published next spring. We recently had the chance to discuss the evolution of her career as a cartoonist and writer, and her forthcoming book about a young man’s formative summer in New York City.

Ariel Schrag, Cartoonist & Writer
Listen to the profile by clicking on the play button below. iPad/iPhone users click here.

***

Ariel has kept diaries since she was seven. Here’s one of her first.

An important early influence was Ariel Bordeaux’s pioneering minicomic Deep Girl.

Here are some of the reference books on Ariel’s shelf.

Here are some of the personal effects she keeps in her workspace.

And here is a brief video of Ariel at work:

***

Photos and video by Allyson McCabe.

Related Posts:

• Attention, Attention
• ALBUM #4, AUDIO PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS AT WORK: Lea Thau
• ALBUM #3, Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work: Rosie Schaap
• ALBUM #2, Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work: Angela Jimenez
• ALBUM #1, Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work: Stephanie Tamez

In works such as the series, Fairy Tales & other Stories, the fantastic coalesces with recognizable images from fairy tales and fables, communicating a particular theme or narrative. A girl in a blue dress and white apron, sitting at a table with an opulent tea party, may communicate Alice in Wonderland. It has been said that fairy tales exist to guide us in the decisions we make, and teach us right from wrong. In Rosen’s photographs, the natural world is overpowering, with a flush that hums of danger, a world not too different from our own.

Claire Rosen received a Liberal Arts AA degree from Bard College at Simon’s Rock in 2003 and graduated from the Savannah School of Art and Design in 2006 with a BFA in Photography. Her other fine art projects include Birds of a Feather and The Millbrook Collection. She has had exhibitions across the United States, and in Dubai and Norway, and most recently, she was included on the 2012 Forbes 30 Under 30 for Art and Design.

***

The Rumpus: Let’s begin with a simple one. How did you get interested in photography?

Claire Rosen: I took my first photo class as an elective at Simon’s Rock because I had a crush on a boy, and then I became obsessed with photography. I remember being in the darkroom for the first time and watching the image come up, and I think that is what did it for me. It felt very magical.

I only made this connection recently—even in my first photo classes, I was setting things up. I was never walking around and shooting what was around me. I was making little scenes in these little worlds, so it was more of a tool to get out what was in my head.

Rumpus: That’s interesting. I see photography as this natural impulse because of our need to record our lives as we live and see it. Look at how ubiquitous Instagram has become. For you, this wasn’t a natural step; you went straight to setting up scenes. What words would you use to describe what you’re trying to do as an artist?

Rosen: Photography is a vehicle for me to explore things that I find interesting that usually have some place in history and some relation to wonder, awe, whimsy, reverie, magic, and fantasy. I think that all of those things are addressed in every project that I do. The part that I really enjoy is the building, the creating of the world. The photograph is a byproduct of that.

Rumpus: Fairy Tales & other Stories presents worlds that are unknown and fantastical. Yet, even with this feeling of otherness, there is an immediate familiarity with the images presented because they are recognizable as fairy tale tropes. How does this affect the viewer’s relationship with the photographs in this series?

Rosen: I think [fairy tales] illuminate the universality of the human condition. From an image-making standpoint, using fairy tales provides a common base of visual symbolism that is part of a shared cultural memory, so your viewer is likely to understand the themes you are trying to convey.

For example, an image of a girl in a red cape with a basket will immediately be identified as Little Red Riding Hood, even without a wolf or woods. A fair, dark-haired woman holding a bitten apple will make most people think of Snow White. These stories are all very visually rich and fantastical in nature, but deal with issues that are grounded in the reality of human psychology and development.

Rumpus: What issues might these be?

Rosen: At their core, fairy tales and many children’s stories are road maps for behavior, or cautionary tales about right and wrong. I’m reading this book by Bruno Bettelheim called, The Uses of Enchantment. It’s about the importance of fairy tales in a child’s psychological development, and how, because a child’s interpretation of the fairy tales are quite different than adults, they are actually very useful for getting through certain childhood stages.

The hero character is almost always presented with a difficulty that they have to overcome, and they have to develop as a person to overcome this problem. [Solving the problem] is not something that happens immediately, and it is something that requires perseverance and is not always easy. I really appreciate the lessons that are in fairy tales. So, I think that’s why I’m so drawn to them.

Rumpus: How does this sense or idea of growth relate to these photos as self-portraits?

Rosen: I think fairy tales are an appropriate vehicle to look at my own journey of becoming an adult, even if it’s a little bit later than the age group that it was intended. The idea is that it’s about a journey, and they’re almost always about figuring out who you are, and doing the right thing.

Rumpus: What do you think you’re revealing about yourself?

Rosen: My self-portraits were done at a time of uncertainty; it was directly after graduating from college, and as I think many students can relate, the weeks and months that followed were filled with questions about what would come next.  ”What do I think about the world and what is my place in it?”, “What do I want my life to be like?”, “How am I ever going to make money?”, and “What is the ‘right’ path to take in terms of my decisions?” So these photos are really a way to symbolically manifest these questions where I use nature as a way of scaling it—to represent insecurity, vulnerability, and uncertainty. I think in looking back at them, that they really feel almost paralyzed, like a moment of indecision, where you are kind of waiting to see what happens.

The newer ones that I’ve made, to me, they feel more like a quest or journey than any of the other ones. It feels more proactive and more symbolic of my state of mind right now. I have a goal, I have a mission, I have something I’m traveling towards.

Rumpus: This shift is perceptible, I think, in your movement from being passive in your relationship with nature to the more recent photos, such as “The Quest,” where you talk to a bird, no longer being dominated by the natural world. In Fairy Tales & other Stories, nature has such an exquisite, ethereal feel, almost a dreaminess, emphasizing its inconceivable scale and adding to the photo’s sense of timelessness. Do you use Photoshop to get these effects?

Rosen: It depends on the image. I don’t have a consistent Photoshop routine, and some pictures need it and some don’t. My feeling on this is that I do whatever makes the image look like how I want it. So I don’t have any rules or qualms about Photoshop, but I do try and do as much as I can in camera. Some of the ones that look the most Photoshopped aren’t, and some of the ones that don’t look Photoshopped at all are.

Rumpus: One of the images that really stood out to me was of the peasant girl standing in the bucket. The bucket, the dress—it’s wonderful. How did that one come about?

Rosen: So that was a dress I’d found at a flea market in Maine two weeks earlier. When I lived in Maine, I always had a big suitcase in my trunk filled with ball gowns, old prom dresses from Goodwill or The Salvation Army, with other random things I had found, so that I had all these ingredients in case I came across a landscape or found a spot that I really liked. That picture was done during a workshop that Joyce Tenneson, the woman I worked for, was teaching for Norwegian photographers. The students had been photographing all day in a beautiful local garden. As they were wrapping up to leave, I had the opportunity to make an image for myself. I’d been running around this garden all day and for some reason could not come up with an idea for the life of me. Then I noticed the empty pot/flower planter and thought almost sarcastically that I should go stand in it because it would represent my lack of creativity. I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome and thought it would be appropriate to name the image “Mnemosyne,“ after the Greek goddess of memory, because she is the mother of the Muses, where all creativity comes from.

Rumpus: Most of your photographs visually reference fairy tales in general, rather than one specifically. Do you have a favorite fairy tale?

Rosen: I’ve always liked Twelve Dancing Princesses.

Rumpus: I’ve never heard of that one. Can you tell it?

Rosen: A king had twelve daughters, each prettier than the next. Every night, they would be locked away in their room and every morning, all of the princesses would be in their beds, but their shoes would have been danced to bits. The king could not figure out how this had happened. The king proclaimed that whoever could solve the mystery would be promised his kingdom and allowed to wed one of his daughters. (However, if they failed after three nights, they would be sentenced to death). Princes came from far and wide and one after another, they failed to discover what the girls were up to.  

One day, a traveling soldier came to the assistance of an old woman in the woods, and she gave him an invisibility cloak and warned him not to eat or drink anything given to him by the princesses. The soldier was well received at the palace and in the evening, the eldest princess offers him a cup of wine which the soldier only pretends to drink and begins to snore loudly as if asleep.

The soldier, with his magic cloak, watches as the twelve princesses dress in gowns and exit through a passageway on one of their beds. The passageway leads them to three groves of trees: the first having leaves of silver, the second of gold, and the third of glittering rubies. The soldier breaks off a twig of each as evidence. They walk until they come upon a lake with twelve boats and twelve princes. Each princess is rowed to a castle on the other side of the lake, into which all the princesses dance the night away.

When it comes time for the soldier to declare the princesses’ secret, he goes before the king with the three branches and a golden cup, and tells the king all he has seen. The princesses know that there is no use in denying the truth, and confess. The soldier gets to marry the youngest princess.

Rumpus: That’s so unlike other fairy tales I’ve heard before; I really like it. What is it about the tale that resonates so strongly with you.?

Rosen: Well, I grew up with many sisters, and I also feel the story highlights the particular difficulties for girls in growing up and the rite of passage into adulthood. I feel the bed acts a doorway to dreams and enchantment. I believe the beautiful visuals in this story, especially the description of the groves of the silver, gold, and ruby trees, represents how precious and valuable that transitional time is in our lives. By dancing the night away with princes, the princesses can act out grown-up roles, though they are not yet grown-ups.

Rumpus: Yeah, and I think the princesses, like a lot of young girls, feel ambivalent about becoming women. Their performance of adulthood only happens in a place associated with magic, and the princesses try to keep their maturation a secret. Culturally, we have this idea that girls yearn to grow up and become women, but the process of growing up is a scary and long process, and not all are ready when biology kicks in.

Switching gears here though, I want to talk about your commercial work. I know that a lot of photographers say, “What I do is fine art,” and see commercial work as beneath them. What makes you see things differently?

Rosen: Because I think that the lines are really shifting between commercial and fine art work, and I also think that it’s kind of a ridiculous statement. If you look at the Sistine Chapel, or Vermeer, those were all commissioned pieces. The Sistine Chapel is a commissioned work, so I think it’s absolutely ridiculous for people to say that they don’t do commissioned work.

Rumpus: So does “commissioned” mean that it’s commercial?

Rosen: It means that someone has paid for it. At the end of the day, it’s semantics. It’s the idea that a commercial image is selling a product, and that makes it not authentic; but I think that is a very limited view of what art can do and of the power of images. Think back to the Benetton ads that Oliviero Toscani did that were hugely controversial, and the social commentary it made. And the images were for Benneton.

Rumpus: I’m not sure how I feel about commissioned work, but it is worth pointing out that film and television, much of which can be considered art, have product placement all the time. What sort of commercial images do you make?

Rosen: My favorite client is a chandelier designer named Alex Randell, who is based out of the U.K. She does these lighting fixtures out of taxidermy animals with spoke objects, and the thing that I really love about her work is that it very much straddles the line between being a fine art piece, in and of itself, and a functional object for your home, which is where I’m striving to be with my photography. Even if a piece is commissioned, it can still exist in the fine art realm.

I can give you an example. This is one of her pieces, it’s an antler chandelier. You might not know that is an advertisement, and that was part of the goal, to make memorable images that people would remember, as opposed to just selling a product.

Rumpus: Yeah, I don’t think anyone would recognize this as an advertisement. How did you make this image?

Rosen: This particular picture was shot in San Francisco. We had a gallery exhibition of the images we had created with her chandeliers. This was one of the new pieces in the show that we wanted to photograph before the show opened. This was done in an elevator shaft; it was raised up and the gates were rigged open. So [the chandelier] is suspended from up here and this is my assistant underneath, with a dynalite head that has bubble wrap in front of it.

Rumpus: I have to say that I love Birds of a Feather. Beautiful and preposterous at the same time.

Rosen:  It started because I went to this bird outlet in Burlington, New Jersey  to track down a toucan for an album cover I was commissioned to do. I’d looked everywhere; it’s really hard to find toucans or inexpensively rent them. We drove an hour and a half to go see this toucan at this bird store that claims to be the biggest bird store in New Jersey. Just walking around, I was inspired by all the colors and the feathers. Birds are so interesting-looking with their beaks and their little claws. I thought I’d really love to photograph these birds. But I thought, “How can I do this in a way that’s different than the people who have photographed birds before?”

I had the idea of paring them with vintage wall paper, wanting the birds to blend in, almost as an optical illusion, so that it looked sort of flat. While I was photographing them, I was really struck by how they took on these almost human characteristics and how posey they were.  It just cracks me up because their little faces are so hammy and ridiculous; they look like people. [These images] really feel more like portraits than I thought they were going to be. I thought they would be more of a still life thing.

Rumpus: Where did you get the birds from? Did you go back to the biggest bird store in New Jersey?

Rosen: Yes. They thought I was crazy. I set up in their lobby, basically, and just did them on a rotation.

Rumpus: What’s your next project going to be?

Rosen: A photographic series of animal feasts, which is also a dream project! 

***

Claire Rosen teaches workshops in cities all over the world. For a complete, up-to-date listing of  upcoming workshops, click here.

***

All photography © Claire Rosen.

Credits:

“The Quest,” 2010
Series: Fairy Tales & other Stories
Locality: Millbrook, NY
Self Portrait

“Mnemosyne,” 2007
Series: Fairy Tales & other Stories
Locality: Rockport, ME
Self Portrait

“Lucern Ferre, The Light Bearer”
Series: Bespoke for Alex Randall, 2011
Client: Alex Randall Lighting

Locality: San Francisco, CA
Advertising Campaign
Credits: Model – Michael Thomson, Set Stylists – Mindi Steiner and Philip Bescemi, Furniture – Ken Fulk inc.
Product: Antler Chandelier

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Jamel Shabazz
• Cross-Culture, Cross-Century Cross-Dressing
• Allen Ginsberg, The Photographer
• A Different Breed of Family Portraits
• Storm-Torn Relics

I learned how to draw in this room, which is to say: I learned how to see. Drawing requires seeing in new ways, and on a good day blinking refreshes sight and brings clarity. My mind has always wandered; I have difficulty staying on point. Drawing demands that I pay attention to the lines and shapes that morph between the fore- and backgrounds, to how light falls on any subject, to the time of day. Now I notice the angle of a twisted shoulder or the steep, dipping edge of a rooftop or the colors of a dead baby bird.

My drawing professor introduced our class to brushes made with sable or synthetic hairs, taught us how leaving them in jars of water wrecked them, and showed us how to loosen the pigment caught in the fibers. She sent us to buy a set of proper drawing pencils, then demonstrated the gradations of texture and density available to us. And when we were restless, she led us out of the studio to collect twigs in the campus gardens. We dipped our new drawing tools into ink jars and learned about line quality.

On Sundays, a handful of students spent hours working in the studio, often not emerging until Monday morning. The unswept, cold, cement floors were covered in pencil shavings and a layer of charcoal dust. Sometimes our professor stopped by with her German shepherd, who stole bites of our donuts and trampled our drawings with her charcoal-covered paws, knocking into Sally, the she-skeleton on wheels who assisted with our anatomy lessons. The industrial steel sinks were stained with paint. Ink seeped into our fingernails, shadows and light shifted, and the same scratched Al Green CD played six times on repeat before someone noticed and yanked the plug from its socket.

Once, our professor took us to Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, hoping we’d find inspiration in desert flora. “Look carefully,” she instructed. “Every plant is a living system. If you take your time, you’ll be amazed at what you’ve never noticed before.” I remember walking through gardens and greenhouses, sketching cactus thorns and examining the curls on the petal of an orchid and touching fine layers of fuzz on rose stems. Waxy succulents bulged with water, and I felt a thrill from my new awareness of a plant body’s surface and interior worlds, of the shape and parts of a living thing.

Another afternoon, we walked into town, and she treated us to ice cream on the condition that we stop to speak to the sculptor carving a block of marble in a nearby park. He welcomed our company and showed us the tools he used to chisel stone. Thin shards of pearly white rock fell away from the mass. Our teacher gave us exercises in seeing, and with steady and diligent practice, I developed a new way of receiving and interpreting visual information.

Relaying this information to the page, on the other hand, can be a maddening and meandering process. In my first year of college, I discovered phthalo blue, a particularly imperious pigment that threatened to dominate any page it met. I did a quick wash of water across a piece of paper, dabbed the tip of my brush into the paint and placed it to the page. It bled immediately, rushing to the edges of the wet area, pooling and darkening there. I was struck by its intensity, and in my struggle to understand its properties, nearly every drawing I did that semester was infused with the same deep-ocean blue. It invaded my drawings, obliterating any subtle gestures I’d managed to make.

In addition to exploring technique, most art classes require a critical component as well. On critique day, my classmates and I nervously pinned our work to the studio walls for public scrutiny. I put up a piece in which I’d twirled and dripped ink to create a barbed wire fence against a watery blue landscape, in hopes of illustrating a hostile barrier to a peaceful place.

“You’ve never seen barbed wire, have you?” my teacher said before the entire class. “These lines are too soft. They’re not threatening at all.”

My eyes grew hot and my throat closed up. I managed to shake my head, embarrassed that I had settled for mere photographs of the subject.

“I can tell,” she continued. “The spikes are beautifully rendered, but they don’t have the effect you intended. The fence and the background have the same quality.” She instructed me to visit the dump in town. “There’s barbed wire there. Take a closer look and then try this again.”

One classmate presented half a dozen homemade journals she had assembled, each filled with sketches drawn daily from the same seat in a cafe. Our teacher praised the energetic drawings but criticized the shabby construction of the books themselves. “If you want us to look at your drawings with care, you can’t put them in a carelessly made vessel.” On the floor, my classmate wept.

Our teacher sighed. “Come on, now. There’s no use in crying.” She emphasized that we would not get it right the first time. “That’s why you’re in this class. Come by my office. I have resources on bookbinding that I can walk you through.”

I was unaccustomed to putting myself in this exposed position on a weekly basis, but it was through these sessions that I learned the practice of looking at work openly, on its own terms. I learned how to articulate with kindness and specificity what I saw in a drawing, whether it was successful or confusing, technically adept or sloppy, moving or clichéd. Most of all, I began to understand the importance of vulnerability, which I’ve come to believe is anybody’s best offering. There was a nakedness to class—a stripping down to the bare marks on the page, a requirement of intimacy, permission to look closer while bearing no weapons. This approach was not easy, but lowering my guard each week was not as difficult as I had expected.

Our drawings came from places of obsession and concern, whether they examined relationships, land, philosophy, politics, culture, or some other new truth we undergraduates had encountered. Siobhan brought an eight-foot-long roll of paper to critique one afternoon, unrolled it and pinned it up with four tacks. I sat on the filthy cement floor of the studio, looking up at her piece—a life-size, nude self-portrait in pencil. Her eyes blazed out from her disproportionate head and the rest of her body—strong rugby thighs, a soft midsection, and tiny feet—floated uncertainly in open space. The drawing was imperfect and raw. It was stunning. That same semester, Daniel hung up his drawing of androgynous young bodies suspended in air in an intricate bubble world. His weightless, unidentifiable figures and imagined landscape created a shared mood of curiosity and melancholy in the studio. That feeling persisted through the semester, and I can still access it now.

I often remember Valerie’s examination of public and private spheres. She drew people in spaces where they considered themselves to be alone but removed the barriers that made those spaces private. In fluid black lines, she drew figures in driving positions, plotted on highways but without the actual cars. She drew people in public bathrooms, seated midair beside each other with their pants around their ankles and no stall walls to separate them. Even now, more than ten years later, I remember her ideas about how we move through shared space, how we protect ourselves from the people close to us. I see her drawings in my head when I ride buses or hurry down densely populated streets where everyone wears headphones and walks alone.

By the end of each semester, because of the intimate subject matter and the regular critiques, I felt closer to classmates I’d never spent time with outside of class than I did to my roommates. This willing and open defenselessness may be the most worthwhile thing a person can give in a culture so often steeped in dishonesty, so obsessed with trends, busy-ness, and sensation. I’ve come to see drawing as a noble branch of expression that values—or even requires—a careful commitment of thought and time. I have struggled to be as generous and sensitive in other parts of my life.

*** 

What is drawing? There have been many attempts to pin down the essence of the form. Is drawing restricted to pen and ink, graphite, and charcoal? What about pieces that include paint? Does the shape of the surface matter? If an artist draws lines on beach sand, does that count? What about contemporary works done with thread, dirt, smoke, or blood? The definition that resonates most with me—and is the most inclusive—is this: Drawing is intentional mark-making.

I love this: intention and mark-making. Drawing has to do with stains and body movement and ideas and a desire to communicate something internal. It is a flawed attempt at representation. It is a tactile, touchable manifestation of the interior.

I remember the first time I ever loved a hard charcoal line, was moved by it, moved away from my inclination toward the ephemeral, light, extra fine, and faint. I felt the power and beauty of a substantial mark. I love smears of graphite on soft paper, like silvery bruises on blank skin. I love to test how much water a sheet of paper can hold, to inundate it with diluted washes of color, to cast a foundation for some emerging vision. I could stare at my friend’s drawings of equine fetuses for hours, studying her manipulation of color and ruminating on her decision to depict horses in utero. In museums, my heartbeat quickens as I stand as close as I can to van Gogh’s drawings, risking reprimands from guards in order to examine the endless layers of curling, black brushstrokes.

Drawing contains so much possibility, beyond conventional portraits and landscapes done in Conté crayon or fine point. Accessibility is built in. Painters need space, oils and acrylics, brushes, easels, canvases, storage. Photographers need darkrooms, light stands, reflectors, backdrops, film, photo paper, software—an entire collection of equipment. But drawing requires no expensive, cumbersome materials (though it does not exclude them, either). I’ve drawn on coffee cups, receipts, notebooks, cardboard scraps, and hands. On long trips, I exchange a few preferred pens and a sketchbook for found utensils and surfaces. In one series of works, Andy Goldsworthy packs leaves, twigs, and dirt into snowballs, then leaves them to melt on pieces of paper. Once the water has evaporated, the warped and stained result is a drawing—intentional mark-making.

There is a simple and fundamental beauty in seeing a person’s intimate intention, of being invited to look at and participate in the physical proof of someone’s ideas, regardless of how succinct or subtle the work is. Ultimately, my hope in any artistic endeavor—whether drawing, writing, or playing music—is to connect. Art making can be a dialogue or, at the very least, a request for just a moment of thoughtfulness outside of someone’s familiar territory.

***

My final assignment that last college semester was to do a drawing based on an imagined city or community with a made-up set of rules about how it functioned. What I saw immediately—and what remains in my head undrawn—was a network of people with clouds of black thread above their heads, who, in the process of crossing paths, became entangled. A few lonely citizens walked around with neat bundles floating above them, but the majority of people had knotted, frayed messes that followed them around, catching on the messes of passersby. The population was knotted together, snagging and pulling and reeling. In this community, there was a system of crossroads, and everyone had an observable relationship to one another. I planned to use a finely sharpened charcoal pencil to draw the tangles, blurring the denser areas with a cloth or tortillon.

Part of creating means coming to terms with the discrepancy between an idea and its expression, which at its best is a surprise, a result beyond what you could have planned. I never realized this exact image on paper, but it persists, vividly, in my mind. I used to see relationships this way, in my frustrations with the barriers to intimacy with any person. On a first date, I saw the terrible, sprawling knots that floated above this stranger’s head like a storm, with strings still attached to relatives and friends and lovers past, pulling at him as he walked into an encounter with me. I wanted people I cared about to be able to snip a thread and leave a bad situation without perpetually feeling that tension, the possibility of being pulled back. I longed for fair beginnings, blank pages, and open meetings. It was unreasonable and naïve, but I wanted to cut those obligatory ties. We all come with a history of relationships that continue to shape us, and in a way, they stop us from ever being autonomous. Of course this is foolish, this denial of history, this seeming wish for clean slates. How bleak to think we are all built to damage each other from the start, with invisible attachments that dictate and restrain all of our behavior, never letting us be a certain kind of free. At the same time, I wanted to acknowledge and honor the experiences that have made us into complex and human and beautiful beings. We are bound to our convoluted families, drawn to the individuals we love, linked to people across great distances. I wanted those relationships made visible.

A piece will never turn out as planned. My actual drawing for this project was void of the somber grayscale I envisioned and was instead imbued with fluid color. I pinned a horizontal, five-foot-long scroll of vellum on top of an equally long sheet of textured paper with deckled edges. On the translucent surface, using candy-colored drawing inks, I drew dozens of heads belonging to humans, animals, creatures, some with radioactive green eyes, others with purple complexions. Then, I connected each head to at least one other by dripping, blowing, and painting trails of ink and water between them. I attempted to guide the drops down the page from head to head, but they chose their own erratic paths. On the underlying paper, partially visible beneath the network of faces, I circumscribed small patches of handwritten text: overheard dialogue, fragments from books and letters, journal excerpts, lines I could recall from arguments. The vellum was nonabsorbent and resisted soaking, so the water puddled. I left the piece to dry overnight. In the morning the water had evaporated, leaving a flat but vibrant map of interconnected heads and words. The dynamic result, over which I had only partial control, surprised me.

***

Almost all of my work is based on the human figure and focused on the face. Often, I use photographs for reference, though instructors always emphasize the importance of drawing from life, as two-dimensional images cannot fully capture complexities of light and shape. Portraiture requires taking the time to look closely at the landscape of a human face of a lover or a friend or an acquaintance, and when I ask someone to model for me, regardless of how casual the request, I am initiating a close encounter.

My friend John sat for me one night on the condition that he could watch a movie to prevent boredom. He started Full Metal Jacket as I set up a makeshift easel with my oversize clipboard and a chair. As military officials barked orders at their subordinates on screen, I focused in on John’s head—ballooned it, made his features bulbous, exaggerated by shadows from the flickering television set. I gave him a wide, wispy crown of hair by smearing black charcoal outward, and when he shifted his position or pestered me—“Are you done yet? Why aren’t you done yet?”—I would command him back into place.

His face was flat—I hadn’t ever noticed before. His eyes, nose, and mouth were wide and round and stretched across his face. His attention was fixed and he rarely blinked. On the page, his head hovered, unanchored by a neck or body, in rapt attention of some dramatic scene.

It took me the length of the film to finish the portrait, and John laughed, a little nervously, as I packed up my supplies. His reaction was similar to those of my previous subjects. They are usually surprised, seeing hints of themselves in my distorted vision. They leave bemused but also invested. Capturing likeness on the page is a challenge; I’ve rarely been successful with accurately depicting specific features—the slope of an eyelid, the exact shape of a nostril, the precise relationship between the corner of a mouth and the curve of a jaw. “That’s me!” a coworker once said. “Except with a really long chin.” Another friend who sat for me in my living room for four hours looked at my ink-wash drawing and said, “Why does it look like I’m crying?” As in any art, the attempt is for emotional truth. My expectations and plans get lost in the process, and the end product might have only a vague relation to my initially imagined forms. But sometimes, a subject experiences a moment of resonance, a realization that I’ve seen something intangible in him.

Interactions between people are full of averted gazes; prolonged and focused staring is uncomfortable in most social circumstances. So spending a few hours staring at a face is startling and revelatory. In figure drawing classes, students study anatomy and train their eyes to peel back layers of fat and muscle and push past tendons and organs to see the structure of a body—its true frame. We go all the way to the bone, to the foundation of a human system, to see what is inside. In my figurative work, I imagine into interiors, and then I draw a suddenly familiar surface based on that visualization. I draw people with the intention of looking closely, of prying and imagining, of taking the time to really see.

Many afternoons, a skinny, middle-aged woman with red hair modeled for our figure drawing class. We were usually disappointed to see her, preferring models with bulging rolls of fat or muscles that flexed visibly beneath the skin. As one classmate put it, “No flesh, no fun.” But these sessions in which she stood and stretched naked before us were remarkable. They were meditations, careful considerations of what constitutes another human being. It felt like important work—to look and create with care, to begin to understand a person. During breaks, the model would put on a robe and weave through the easels, smiling and seeing how we saw her.

***

I am conflicted with my choice to pursue creative endeavors—the susceptibility to misinterpretation, the tedious process of creating, my own inevitable shortcomings and mistakes.

In drawing, there are always accidents: a bottle of Higgins black ink overturned on a meticulously drawn portrait, wounds on paper from excessive eraser rubbings, disintegrating fibers of a surface unable to carry the water imposed on it. My first reaction is always of panic and fear that the work cannot be saved. Often, it can’t.

During my senior year of college, I failed miserably at the architecture segment of an experimental drawing course. I struggled with the exact lines and angles required of perspective pieces, with getting the three-dimensional to somehow translate onto a cold-pressed cotton page. My lines swerved into inaccuracy; I was unable to depict the precise intersections of floors into walls and buildings into horizons.

I am easily frustrated with the properties of certain media. Weak orange pigments must be mixed with stronger yellows and reds, a procedure that tests my flimsy understanding of color. Black pigments are notoriously difficult, appearing too blue or red or brown on the page. I’ve tried many unsuccessful combinations of compressed charcoal, ink, and watercolor. A blank page or a failed project can incite a deep and crippling anxiety. Ideas spark and thrill me for an evening, never to be followed up on. I’ll expect osmosis to kick in, unwilling to invest or make my way through that muddy and lightless place. My sketchbooks, shelves, and closets house pieces I’ve abandoned at every stage—a testament to the dangers of not seeing a project to its conclusion, evidence of the novice’s fear.

A useful reminder: drawing is as much about practice as it is about results. A professor from graduate school said, in response to a report of my recent writing habits, “One hour a day is good, a little more is a little better…it’s all just process.” Making drawing a consistent part of my life—its inherent anxieties and joys—has changed how I move through the world, transforming the way I see and think and make sense of people and place. In cemeteries, I walk among headstones and marble busts wondering: graphite or ink wash? Drawing a stone wall brick by brick teaches me what I didn’t know about its construction, textures, and function. When I ask a friend to sit still so I can draw him, he is allowing me to look, to try to see him. When those I wish to draw do not stay still, I draw their faces from photographs to find what I have missed.

Drawing serves as another form of communication when words, music, and movement do not suffice. There are so many versions of truth, and any medium can surprise me. I’ve long had an aversion to biography, journalism, and statistics—fields that too often claim objectivity, that do not approach their potential for daring and empathy, for illuminating mystery. Obstinate personalities make me uncomfortable, as do declarations from people whose eyes do not waver, whose hands do not tremble. I lose conviction in arguments, too quickly seeing the other side. The advantage with drawing is that I get to go further inside; at the expense of certainty and the concrete, I’ve gained an openness to the many realities that exist simultaneously.

***

Why draw? It didn’t take me long to write off drawing as a viable profession, deciding instead to take unrelated jobs over those that claimed to integrate artistic inclinations with fruitful careers. After brief and miserable stints in illustration, I slowly began to understand my personal problem with selling my creative abilities in order to give life to other people’s visions. It is a commercialization of skills I’d prefer to reserve for the most intimate explorations and revelations. It eats at me until I resolve never to do it again. (I cave repeatedly—susceptible to commission requests, pleas, and admiration—but it helps to calculate my labor in terms of hourly wages, which are, of course, paltry.)

But even as I limit and protect how drawing fits into my life, I worry that the effort is frivolous, insular, inconsistent. Struggle, disappointment, and failure are intrinsic to the process. I suspect I am an imposter. I doubt my craft. In a series of figurative drawings, I spent days perfecting the lines that formed the life-size bodies of contorted, homunculus-like creatures—what appeared to be a thick, elegant line was in reality made up of thousands of thin, painstakingly crosshatched marks. Every line I made felt cautious and contrived. An artist friend complimented me on my bold, graceful brushstrokes, and I confessed that I had used a Japanese drawing pen with a 0.005 millimeter tip to get a seemingly spontaneous and smooth effect. I obsess over detail to the point where drawing feels desperate, dishonest, too purposeful. I wonder if I am bringing pretension rather than intention to the page. Paralyzed by the fear of being a fraud, I envy the confidence of artists whose works seem more genuine, whose gestures seem immediate and sure.

I suspect, however, that there might be nothing more important than making human connections, and drawing is one way I’ve attempted and occasionally succeeded to this end. The most successful and enduring artists create something that eliminates the boundaries between themselves and those who encounter their work. Inciting a visceral reaction in someone else, whose internal processes and heart history I have no knowledge of but can still access on some level, is what drives me. Seeing, like listening, demands sincere engagement. Art is an act of finding, making, and forcing meaning; a synthesis of witness and imagination; a course that veers always toward empathy. It means being ready for, and receptive to, someone else’s truth meeting yours.

Maybe drawing is one way of acknowledging and loving another person. When a stranger is moved by my work, I spark with a certain warmth—an affirmation that what I see and how I’ve translated it visually resonates with someone else. It makes it easier to immerse myself in assembling shapes and lines, in the possibilities of color. It makes it easier to say something as terrifying as “I am going to commit myself to a life of art.” It isn’t the paper or the pigment or anything I can see, but rather the idea, the implicit confirmation of life.

That’s the job, I’m finally beginning to understand: First, to see. Then, to connect and give shape to the disparate elements we share with the people in our homes and across the planet. It is a choice artists have always made: to look for and interpret how light falls on a subject, to translate the nuances within a shadow, to give shape to what they record, to resist from turning away. They open their eyes, blink, look closer, and look again in order to see the world anew. My impulse, at the risk of appearing humorless and unfocused, is to follow sincerity and tangents, to remain honest as memory and fabrication spider onto the page.

I maintain that anyone can learn to draw—to measure, interpret, and relay—the relationship of one thing to another, but as with any skill, it atrophies with neglect. My last serious drawings, which I completed over six years ago, explored the unintentional intimacy and alienation of urban life, the ways we are bound inextricably to each other. On sheets of paper measuring 22½ x 30 inches, I drew globular masses composed of a dozen faces fused together: noses and cheeks melded, overlapping and shared skin, sets of eyes cast askance from the same dense boulder floating at the center of a great white page. In cities, our lives press up against one another; we move through intimate encounters and practice connection and avoidance on buses and in bed. We belong to communities by birth, choice, force, or imagination.

Seeing is hard work. Perspective slips into disrepair. How easily I make quick judgments and disappear, unchecked, into glowing screens. Fear moves in, and I barricade myself at home, in airtight schedules, in hollow consumption, in the habit of saying no. I can quickly become the person I loathe. But there are dangers that come from failing to actively look, and the truth is there are far, far more terrifying realities than committing to art. The hazards of inertia and impaired vision have real stakes, and making marks on paper is one method of accountability to the worlds I inhabit—a promise of sorts.

***

If you monitor where the sun hits a weed-ravaged patch at sunrise, midday, and dusk, you’ll discover miniature deserts and rainforests in your own backyard where there was once a monochrome field of green. If you notice the tremors in a human hand, you can begin to see specific sorrow and elation. If you really look, simple narratives expire, and difficult, gorgeous stories find new homes in their subjects, tellers, and audiences.

Drawing is the cartographic precision of contour, and building form from negative space. It is inquiry and self-portrait. It is process: the weight of water loaded onto a bamboo Chinese calligraphy brush, and the smell of oil and soot as you agitate the saturated bristles against an ink stone to make paint, and the lush marks bleeding onto rice paper to give shape to wonder and grief. Somewhere among the calculated marks and intuitive gestures is the act of making that lets you touch mystery and demands your delicate, dogged attention.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Dmitry Samarov
• GENERATION GAP #1: Tomokazu Matsuyama’s Quiet Compass for a Noisy Revolution
• The Rumpus Interview with Craig Yoe
• Boyz II Mentos and Other Illustrated Puns
• All Over Coffee #631

Related Posts:

• “Ooh! A Pencil App!”
• Jason Novak’s Lowdown on North Korea
• The Next Letter in the Mail: Jason Novak
• A Snow Story
• The Next Letter in the Mail: Jason Novak

Born and raised in suburban Connecticut, Dojny went on to study art at Oberlin College—where he drew a much-beloved strip, “Making Choices,” in the campus paper—then made the requisite pilgrimage to New York City to try his luck selling his paintings. He quit in disgust a few years later, in spite of finding a number of devoted collectors, among them the painter and sculptor Red Grooms. He never stopped drawing, however, and this past year, finding himself with some free creative energy for the first time since beginning his novel, he began, almost by accident, making comics again, and posting them daily in his Tumblr, hiphopisthefuture. “I got an iPad for Christmas, and for the longest time, I couldn’t think of what I could possibly use it for,” he said in a recent interview. “Then I found a great, simple art app called ‘Paper,’ and started doodling on it while I was hanging out in my three-year-old son’s room, keeping him company and waiting for him to fall asleep. Now he’s come to expect a drawing from me every night. It’s kind of like the situation with my parents, actually, way back when—I’m not sure what he makes of them. He falls asleep, though, so I can’t complain.”

***

***

***

***

***

***

***

***

***

***

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

After seeing a piece or two, I did some heavy Internet stalking. I was floored. Dmitry’s spontaneous cab drawings had such great composition and confidence. You could almost feel his grimace in so many of his lines. And his more thought-out cab paintings managed to maintain that moment. I’m not sure if the text he writes accompanies the drawings or the drawings accompany the text—but they work so well together, only a fool would ask. His oil paintings of books and apartment interiors and exteriors were a de Kooking/Giorgio Morandi/Philip Guston gang-bang—and they were beautiful. They are beautiful.

And he’s made so. Much. Work.

In addition to his painting and drawing, Dmitry published a book in 2011 called Hack. A few months ago, he successfully completed a Kickstarter to quit driving a cab and draw and write full-time. And he’s now working on a second book.

Dmitry Samarov: Nope. I was born in the Soviet Union and my family moved to the Boston area when I was seven. I first got to Chicago in 1990 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I’d spent my first semester of college at Parsons in New York and hated it so much, I transferred to SAIC after just half a year. I moved away after graduating in 1993, but moved back in 1997 and have been here ever since.

All in all, I’d certainly say that Chicago is as close to a place I could call home as I’ve ever had.

Rumpus: How did you start making art?

Samarov: I don’t remember ever not doing it. It’s always been my primary way of dealing with the world.

Rumpus: For years you wrote and drew about your experiences as a cab driver. How did that come about?

Samarov: I started driving a cab in Boston in 1993, right after graduating from art school. I needed a job and knew my BFA just about qualified me for a service industry gig. One day, looking through the want-ads, I saw a “Drivers Wanted” ad and followed it to Checker Taxi of Boston on St. Botolph Street. A couple weeks later (after taking some very rudimentary classes), I became a cab driver.

There was a lot of downtime in the cab waiting on hotel cab stands and out at the airport, so I started drawing self-portraits in the rearview mirror, and the view of the city out the cab’s windows. I never had any grander plans for these drawings, it was just a way to record where I was spending my nights. When I started driving again in Chicago, I had already self-published the first version of Hack, so I probably knew that the artwork I’d do in the cab would be part of some larger project.

Ultimately, though, the reason I painted and drew in the cab is that my artwork has always come from the outside world, and if that outside world for sixty to eighty hours a week is in and around a taxi, then that’s what the pictures will be of. There was just no way around it.

Rumpus: What’s your process with this work? Did you paint onsite, or from photos or memory?

Samarov: All the paintings and drawings of cabs like these were done on the spot, in whatever time was available, whereas most of the pictures of cab customers, as well as many of the other illustrations for the Hack stories, were done from memory. I wish I could’ve pulled the cab over and had some of the passengers pose for me, but that didn’t happen much. My first choice is always to work from life, but that isn’t always possible.

Rumpus: Did painting and writing about the people you observed change your relationship with them? Did you know any of them?

Samarov: I never started conversations with passengers. I’d ask, “Where to?” and then keep quiet, unless they wanted to talk. I don’t know that writing about them changed things much. I’ve always been a watcher and listener, first and foremost; the cab just gave me a different, more intimate venue to do what I’ve always done.

I didn’t ever draw passengers that I didn’t already know. I did form some friendships with passengers, though, and, sometimes, they would pose for portraits, but not in the context of the cab. The stories and pictures in the cab depended on a certain level of anonymity and non-interaction with the subjects. I needed a distance from them in order to see and portray them truthfully and clearly.

Rumpus: How long did you drive a cab for? How did your writing and artwork change over time?

Samarov: I drove for twelve years in all: three in Boston and nine in Chicago. I know the writing changed a lot over that time. I never had any ambition to write before finding myself behind the wheel and being bombarded by stories. By the time my book came out in 2011, I could almost call myself a writer without being embarrassed.

As to the artwork, it’s harder to say, but I think that the time I put in painting out the cab’s windows couldn’t have hurt. Prior to driving a cab my work was much more centered on interiors, on rooms, be it my own apartment or the coffee shop or bar where I was spending my days or nights. Driving around the city made me much more interested in painting the city. I’ve never really been much interested in nature, but the built environment is an endless fascination to me.

Rumpus: How did your book Hack come about? (And an aside: why is it called Hack?)

Samarov: It’s called Hack because that was an old term for a cab driver. In Boston, the license to drive a cab was called a Hackney Carriage license. Of course the other meanings of the word are a great added bonus (especially for a piece of writing). I made a zine called Hack in 2000, to tell about my time behind the wheel in Boston. I revived it as a blog a few years after starting to drive again here in Chicago. I never had any plan for it to become a book, but the longer it went, the more it became clear that it was adding up to something. Levi Stahl at University of Chicago Press became a fan of my writing and pitched it to them as a book. Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab was published in October, 2011.

I’m now working on a second book: more illustrated stories from behind the wheel. I go a bit deeper into the inner-workings of the cab industry, as well as the reasons why I got into the cab racket to begin with. It covers from 1993 (when I started driving) to 2012 (when I quit). It’s not really a sequel to the first book, but rather another take on similar subject matter through a wider, clearer lens than was available to me for the first one.

I’m waiting on a couple publishers to get back to me, but I hope to have it out sometime in 2014.

Rumpus: Speaking of books, you also have a really different body of work: you make these incredibly lush oil paintings of your bookshelves—messy stacks, goops of paper building up and falling across the canvas. It seems like you’ve done tons of them—all variations on the theme. What attracts you to the subject matter?

Samarov: I’ve been painting pictures of my bookshelf for about fifteen years now. What I like about it is that it’s always changing. Books, magazines, postcards, etc. are taken out and replaced with others over time, so it never stays the same. Every time I start a new picture, it’s of a different bookshelf in a way. It solved a problem I always had with painting still-lifes. I always hated setting them up; it felt like homework and like I was stage-managing a “scene,” whereas I’ve always been more interested in catching what’s already out there. I also find it funny to paint the outsides of books when everything a book is is contained between their covers and in no way visible in a painting.

Rumpus: And the paintings are in every way—subject, time, medium, smell, repetition, meditation—the complete opposite of the Internet, namely Twitter, which is how you and I met. You have this work that’s about such direct interaction and observation, and often it’s shown to distant strangers on a screen made of light. What role does this play in your your art-making, if any?

Samarov: I was really late to the Internet. I didn’t even know how to turn on a computer ’til sometime in 2003, but very soon after I dove in up to my neck. Once I made my peace with the fact that no matter how I photographed my work, it wouldn’t look anything like it does in person, I was off and running. There’s definitely an irony in the fact that I’ve gotten whatever acclaim or attention I’ve gotten through a virtual medium, when what I do is made of paper and canvas and paint. I have daydreams of unplugging from all these networks one day, but that just isn’t possible yet.

***

Where to see Dmitry’s drawings and paintings:

“Dmitry Samarov: Bookshelf Paintings” is up through March 1st at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago.

“Dmitry Samarov: Paintings & Drawings” is up until mid-March at Atomix Coffee in Chicago.

“Shay DeGrandis: Crushes & Dmitry Samarov: Covers” opened February 22nd at Elastic Arts in Chicago.

Other works online:

Commercial and Editorial Illustration: record covers, travelogs, and sports articles, and work for the The Chicagoan

Commissions: pet portraits, to paintings of bars, to children’s book illustrations

***

All featured artwork © by Dmitry Samarov.

First image: “Stoops,” sumi ink on paper, 32×40 inches, 2008.

Second image: “Staging Area #10,” gouache on paper, 9×13 inches, 2009.

Third image: “Beverly Living Room,” gouache on paper, 9×13 inches, 2010.

Fourth image: “Soutine,” oil on board, 13×14 inches, 2001.

Related Posts:

• Drawing the Connection
• Election 2012: curious what NPR looks like behind the scenes?
• Should I Check My Email?
• Meanwhile, Mission Bartenders
• Meanwhile,
  The San Francisco Dog Walkers

Angela Jimenez, Photojournalist
Listen to the profile by clicking on the play button below. iPad/iPhone users click here.

***

Night Stage raising crew, listening. 2006. From the book project Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, self-published 2009.

Boats destroyed by the Indian Ocean Tsunami in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, India. 2005.

Master’s track & field athlete Johnnye Valien, 82, of Los Angeles, putting the shot at the World Masters Championships in Misano Adriatico, Italy. 2007.

Angela’s father, Jacques Jimenez, at home in Stamford, Connecticut. 2009.

***

Photos and captions by Angela Jimenez, except the portrait of Angela, photo credit: Steve McFarland. All images are copyrighted, all rights reserved.

***

This profile is the second in our series ALBUM: Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work.

Related Posts:

• ALBUM #5, AUDIO PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS AT WORK: Ariel Schrag
• ALBUM #4, AUDIO PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS AT WORK: Lea Thau
• ALBUM #3, Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work: Rosie Schaap
• ALBUM #1, Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work: Stephanie Tamez
• Representing Africa Through iPhone Photography

King Leopold of Belgium once warned Britain’s Queen Victoria of dealings with artists: “They are acquainted with all classes of society, and for that reason dangerous; they are hardly ever satisfied, and when you have too much to do with them, you are sure to have des ennuis.”

Street art has climbed from subways and stairwells straight into the face of mainstream society, and Gastman’s always there, giving it a leg-up. The graffiti impresario started While You Were Sleeping magazine in his mother’s suburban garage, with graduation money at the age of nineteen. When that folded years later, he launched Swindle, a high-end pop culture quarterly, with Shepard Fairey—all while publishing dozens of graffiti books, agenting other street artists into clothing lines and corporate branding gigs, curating gallery shows, and eventually producing films like Banksy’s Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop and Wall Writers.

Today, he’s winding down after the opening weekend of Pump Me Up: D.C. Subculture of the 1980s, his second exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It opened in tandem with a 320-page book/catalog of the same name and the release of his film The Legend of Cool “Disco” Dan—a documentary profiling its graffiti king namesake, while exposing some dusty cobwebs of our nation’s capital. Many see Washington, D.C. as the seat of power in the Western world, but locals know another Washington lives in the shadow of the Capital. Gastman’s film and exhibit explore a city often invisible to millions of tourists. It’s the story of what lives beneath the international spotlight of politics and history—the go-go music subculture spawned amidst ’80s drug wars, institutionalized marginalization, a crack-smoking mayor, and crime-infested streets. (The Washington Bullets changed their name to The Wizards in the ’90s, due to negative connotation after D.C. was dubbed the “murder capital.”)  All of this parallels and sometimes intersects a world-renowned punk scene that launched the likes of Dischord Records, Dave Grohl, and the Bad Brains.

Pump Me Up tells the subterranean stories of our nation’s capital: the people living behind the marble monuments and amongst annual outbursts of cherry blossoms. They are funny, violent, crude, and compelling tales of survival and creation. Thanks to people like Roger Gastman, they get to be told.

***

The Rumpus: How did a nice Jewish kid from Bethesda get into graffiti?

Roger Gastman: Am I that nice? I think there’d be different opinions on how nice I am depending on whom you ask. In the early ’90s I was into punk rock and hardcore music. Everyone had a tag. They were running around writing on crap. It seemed interesting—I didn’t do it at first. By the end of 8th grade I started screwing around with it a little bit and by the middle of 9th grade I was totally immersed in it. Running around downtown, stealing spraypaint, running around at night doing stuff I shouldn’t have been doing. Most of the people from the suburbs were dumb enough to write all over the suburbs and would quickly get caught, get in trouble, get raided by the police, and that would usually be the end of their graffiti careers. Their parents would not be too happy that there were a lot of police cars in front of their houses. For whatever reason, I learned not to do that or to write a different name, and just kept at it. I was never the best graffiti writer; I was never the worst. I did a lot of it, traveled for it, and I met a lot of people through it.

My mom knew what I was up to, to an extent. I tried to hide it at first. I’m sure she didn’t like it. I’m sure she still doesn’t like it, but even if she would have taken all my paint and thrown it away I would have done it no mater what. Honesty was the best policy in a way.

Rumpus: What role did politics or locale play in ’80s-era D.C. subculture and art?

Gastman: Well, you would know about the 80s more than me…

Rumpus: Ha. Oh yeah, because I’m old. Were you about five years old then? Okay, ’80s and ’90s D.C. subculture…was it influence by being in a political city?

Gastman: From everything I’ve seen, although D.C. is the nation’s capital or “most important city in the world” or whatever, most of the people that were living there weren’t paying attention to anything that was going on.  Especially in the communities where go-gos and go-go crews leading into gangs were happening, the part that made it the “murder capital of the world” at the time.

Rumpus: You could argue that no one in D.C. paid attention to them. It’s still a city whose citizens do not even get a vote in Congress.

Gastman: Yes. I don’t want to make it sound like they were ignorant. If you grow up in it, you’re going to be somewhat immune to things and think, Yeah, that’s just how it is. Reagan and whoever was in Congress [were] not directly affecting any of these people in these neighborhoods. It was more local government-centric. Marion Barry was there, and everyone was very aware of him and who he was. He was a hero to so many. One of the things people loved about him, that they still talk about, was his youth summer jobs program, which was enacted in 1979. If you were in high school and you wanted a job, you’d have one. It might be raking leaves somewhere, but people remember that they had a job and got a little paycheck every two weeks, and many say it helped keep them out of trouble. That’s something that came up in making this movie. No matter how slimy the things he’s done seem, he seemed to be seen as less a politician and more a champion of the people.

On the other side of Washington, where punk rock and hardcore was going on, they were much more aware of politics. Lots of social issues were brought up. Early on in both subcultures, it’s just kids wanting to rebel and create something. Punk rock, graffiti, go-go—none of them are rooted in politics.

Rumpus: Is it fair to say go-go happened in spite of politics, and punk was more a reaction?

Gastman: Part of punk was reacting to politics and social issues. This is mentioned in the book, but there are go-go songs about being poor, not having any money, trying to figure stuff out—more personal politics.

Rumpus: Do you think a movie/exhibit like this brings black and white D.C. artists together, in a way?

Gastman: I don’t know. Yes, we’re bringing them together under one roof, but I think it shows there were two very creative communities going on at the same time.  Some of the go-go community was aware of the punk rock community but didn’t care about it, whereas the hardcore punk rock community spread outside of D.C. quickly, and a lot of those fans were very interested in the go-go music.

Rumpus: You’ve built this street art empire—something that would have been unthinkable to most twenty years ago. Who were your business role models at age nineteen?

Gastman: I had no idea what I wanted to do. I probably have a better idea now than I did in high school. I still don’t fully know what I want to do. Most of what I’ve done is by trial-and-error and learning as I go. I also knew a lot of people who were older than me who had done similar things, and they were kind enough to give me good advice. I always had a good team of people who wanted to contribute to projects I was doing, no matter how big or small the pay would be, or their effort would be, but just because they were interested in projects.

I had a network of people I was selling graffiti supplies to around the country by the time I was nineteen, so that helped. Their advice should have been, “Don’t do a magazine; you’re an idiot.” My mom always helped a lot through the years, and she’s had a lot of her own companies through the years. No matter what kind of business you have, so much of it is relationships with people; paying people on time; when you say you’re going to mail something, do it; etc.

I’ve always wanted bigger—bigger distribution and more. Not to get a bunch of money to buy a crazy car, but to do bigger projects. I understood it wasn’t always going to be self-funded. I’ve done a lot of D.I.Y.; I’ve done a lot of huge corporate projects for different brands, but it’s just a job where I have to charge a fair market rate for that work, so that I can do things like go do a show at the Corcoran. It evens out, somewhat.

Rumpus: What lengths did you go to in curating this show and making this film?

Gastman: This show didn’t start as a show—it evolved from the film, The Legend of Cool “Disco” Dan. Joseph [Pattisall, the director] and I were working on it forever, and just kept digging up posters and images we needed. A film with just talking heads is boring, so we kept getting more visuals and ended up amassing this massive collection of weird D.C. ’80s ephemera that went along with the film and represented this culture. We’ve been working on this film for almost a dozen years, so over time some of this stuff started to actually have some value, and through working with museums on other shows we realized the film sort of became an educational film, whether we wanted it to be or not. Tying it into a museum solidifies that even more.

I’ve had to deal with more weirdos for this film than anything. Sending Moneygrams to old gangsters in the movie, or people we interviewed wanting money because they’ve been generous with their time and shared their life stories, but they don’t really understand how it works. I’ve had to do a lot of odd favors, like sending a photographer to shoot somebody’s daughter on her way to prom…the most random things. Someone could have been filming us—“the dumbest white people with a quarter million dollars worth of camera equipment in D.C.’s ghettos.” Crazy situations and random people.

Rumpus: Describe some of the challenges in preserving and exhibiting things that were never meant to last.

Gastman: Stuff is in all kinds of condition. We’ve had to make some reproductions. Some things that were four-by-six inches and ripped in half, we’ll scan and blow up real big and it’ll have more impact.  The go-go posters—some of them are ripped and tattered, and some look like the day they were made, but that’s part of the charm of them. It’s across the board, from truly vintage stuff, to things that were salvaged from the streets.

Rumpus: Do you think the museum’s had any concerns, doing a show of this nature?

I think their main concern was that it’s an art museum and what are we showing that’s “legitimate art”? Sure, we could argue over what’s “art” and what’s “not art” forever. From a museum standard, when you’re questioning what’s “art,” it’s, “Oh, whose collection is that artist in?” That’s a legitimate concern. I understand that. We were very careful. Say we have ten walls, and on every wall we’ve made sure to have at least two pieces of “real art”—not just a photo of a gang from 1984—that’s a piece of ephemera. But a Glen E. Friedman photo—he’s in museums. We could have gotten a snapshot of Minor Threat from hundreds of photographers, and they could be great snapshots, but if we get the photo of Minor Threat from Glen Friedman, he’s a true museum artist, so that’s real art on your walls.

Everything has been mapped out very specifically. There’s didactic wall text, which discusses what it is, why it’s there. There are so many things we could have included in this exhibit that we won’t. There’s always going to be someone who says, “Why isn’t this in there?” and you know what? We probably thought of it and there’s probably a reason it’s not in there.

Rumpus: It’s kind of a coup, getting graffiti into such establishments and institutions, isn’t it?

Gastman: Five to ten years ago, more so, but at this point, it’s the cool art that everyone wants. Sotheby’s, Bonhams, Phillips—you name it. Every auction house is doing big auctions once or twice a year with urban art, where graffiti is a huge part of it, making millions and millions of dollars. It’s a proven commodity in the art world with true value. Getting go-go tags and people like SEVEN in the Corcoran? Yeah, that’s kind of crazy, but putting the big “culture” word above them as graffiti and street art—it’s fitting.

Rumpus: For the artist, isn’t it the ultimate way of “getting up”?

Gastman: Absolutely. In the Tyler Gallery, there will be a bunch of old black books from MESK. When he was sitting drawing in Virginia and painting on the red line, he never thought about this. He hasn’t painted graffiti in a zillion years—he lives a straight life in New York now, but he’s still interested in the culture, which is cool.

Rumpus: Did you ever think your teenage hooliganism would lead to collaborating with the likes of the Corcoran?

Gastman: I never thought about it. It wasn’t a goal. Early on, I got paid to do graffiti jobs for brands, so it was always a source of income. It’s awesome, but it’s been an organic evolution. A lot of it goes back to relationships with people over the years, because so many of them have recurring roles. If it was just me doing it by myself, it never would have happened.

Rumpus: You’ve gotten graffiti into some pretty mainstream venues. Where can street art go from here?

Gastman: Bigger. Crazier. Higher. More illegal. There is a new breed of artists doing this now. It is amazing and inspiring.

Rumpus: I know you’ve heard a lot of no’s, and had a lot of headaches along the way with this film. You live in L.A. now, but this is sort of a love letter from you to D.C., isn’t it?

Gastman: I better get a thank you. From somebody, dammit.

***

Pump Me Up: D.C. Subculture of the 1980s runs through April 7, 2013 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Legend of Cool “Disco” Dan debuted Saturday, February 23rd at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. Tickets are no longer available for the March 1st screening, however there will be a standby line 30 minutes prior to the showing.

***

All images courtesy of and used with permission by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Roger Gastman.

First image: BRINCAR, SCOTT, SLY.C (ONE9), an unknown writer, KAZ, and MIZER on F Street, c. 1986. Photo courtesy of ONE9.

Second image: Chuck Brown, 1986. Photo by Dean Rutz, for the Washington Times.

Third image: LISA OF THE WORLD, c. 1985. Photo courtesy of LISA OF THE WORLD.

Fourth image: CYCLE, SMK, MESK, and DAH’s Humanity Wall, 1992. Photo by Dave Schubert.

Fifth image: Various Hardcore 7″ records, 1980s. Photo by Aaron Farley. Collection of Roger Gastman.

Sixth image: Go-go graffiti by AWESOME ANYTIME ACE, c.1985. Photo by Dave Schubert.

Related Posts:

• Pre-Olympic Pre-Emptive Strikes
• Keith Haring’s Early Years
• Nasty Ancient Graffiti
• Shepard Fairey in Copenhagen
• Morning Coffee

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Enjoy:

Thoughts on Pope Benedict’s resignation: Carrying the world backwards in time is a mighty burden.

Marco Rubio: A desert of ideas = a mouthful of sand

Kim Jong-Un: “Let them eat mushrooms.”

President Obama’s Unmanned Aerial State of the Union Address

Related Posts:

• Spit and Mud