Vox published by Robbyn Hahn Portland OR 97202 I've lived in Seattle for 12 years. I lived near Portland before that, so I've been in the Northwest for a while. I went to high school in Pendleton, OR. It's a really arid climate there. I got my degree in Fine Arts, at a liberal arts school in Monmouth, OR. Seattle has a moderate climate, from winter to summer we have the same weather. about 60. I'm a gardener, too, so I like the rain. I have a house here with my girlfriend Susan. I go out every day to garden. I've been gardening seriously for five years so I've really started learning plants. The front yard is dry, hard to grow stuff there, but now I know what it can handle. The entire yard was grass, now I've got about two-thirds of it landscaped. I've put some pavers and a patio in. Gardening helps clear the mind, lets me think about something different than the man-made. [laughs] Besides art, I work in a nursing home now, in housekeeping, and there's a lot of stroke patients. I don't know their exact medical histories, but I try to get to know them as people. It's pretty obvious a lot of them have trouble communicating. I'm not as active in the zine world anymore, I'm being more of a fine artist, with more gallery shows and such. I always did that, but now to a greater extent. I've probably gone in about 12 styles and directions with my art. Also several in life, but with art I'm focusing on my cartoon style figures right now. My first big, established solo show was recently at the Roc la Rue gallery in Seattle. Kirsten Anderson runs it, it's a commercial-retail kind of gallery, focusing on . . . Well, there's lots of different words for it. There's a show by Charles Burns there right now, cartoons with an edge, the sort of style that R. Crumb and Robert Williams were the fathers of. Kirsten is a big fan of Juxtapoz magazine, and the content of the gallery frequently reflects this fact. At my show there, I excluded all of my nonobjective squiggilism stuff and just had my figurative paintings. I've been selling more and more paintings. I'm active in the local gallery scene here in Seattle. Since high school I knew I wanted to do art, and there has never been any reason to stop. I'm at a really good place right now. Now I'm doing my work on really fine paper, and using all acrylic paints. I do my own framing too, so they're ready to hang the artwork is well-protected and it looks real professional. I'm still into zines, I'm reading at the Zine Archive Project benefit at the Richard Hugo House here in a few weeks. I'll have a table there for my merchandise and read from some of my favorite zines. I love to collaborate and currently there's a good collaborative effort with my girlfriend, Susan, with her embroidery machine. We've lived together for ten years, and she's always sewn, she makes her own clothes. With the embroidery machine, The trick is to learn the software. Susan mostly does that end of it, I'll give her a color scheme and we'll go through threads and go to the fabric stores together. We got some lame fabric (lame is a very interesting fabric that is very thin and comes in a wide variety of colors that are usually very shiny and reflective, many of Barbies clothes are made with lame) recently and we have a wide variety metallic threads. They've been selling pretty well, when I have paintings at a gallery I have the patches there also. My Mom does quilts, so there are wall hangings also. I do the design, Susan does the embroidery, and my Mom finishes it into a wall hanging or a quilt, or somesuch. People respond well to it, and to the idea of it. Other artists have told me, Oh, I should do something with my Mom. I have another solo show coming up April 2001 at Roc la Rue. My last solo show, nearly 90% of my paintings sold. I'm going to work and get a lot of things ready over the next year. Roc la Rue is straddling the line, it's alternative in a sense but also has a more commercial intent. It needs to keep itself afloat and so is more careful about its guidelines. With a place like Roc la Rue you save up a massive amount of stuff, then hide out for a year and do it again. Actually, I have items for sale there year round. You can find prints, and dolls there on sale now. I'm an attendee of lots of alternative and mainstream art functions in Seattle, and I've shown in many of the alternative galleries and collectives. Alternative spaces afford the opportunity to show all of the time. A lot of my friends were downtown in a space called Project 416, but were evicted due to greedy developers. [laugh] Same story you hear everywhere. Everything fell apart and a year later the old group is back together. At the Market Street Studios. There was a show at Market Street Studios in Ballard that was really successful. It spurred lots of activity, there may be a monthly show there now. People had their stuff in their studios and my stuff was in the halls. It was the one-year anniversary of the zine Red-Headed Stepchild, a reference to being thrown out of the art district. The zine was another outgrowth of the 416 experience. The main person of 416, Walter Wright, wanted to continue the momentum. The new project is called Fuzzy Engine, and will consist of theme shows by a stable of artists. The Ballpark 12 artists discuss the themes and what to do with them in terms of our artwork. I'm pretty excited about it. I usually create my art in a semi-vacuum, things that happen to me or that I stumble on. But with something like this, the question is already conceived. The first theme is gonna be transformation, hybrids. We came up with the idea embodied by the El Camino, the marriage of a car and truck. There's a certain stigma to it that kind of kernel of thought, when two things come together to become a sort of stigmatized kitsch. Or the mullet, what went wrong with this short and long hair? [laugh] Some people like it, I don't want to criticize it. But that's the sort of thing I'll work into my idea. With the Incredible Hulk, I'll be tapping into that transformation thing. It's nice to have the idea before drawing, usually I don't, which is harder. I'll play with that idea, I don't know if he'll be happy or sad or what . . . but he's a man, then he changes into this grossly muscular man, changes color too. It's not usually my style, I draw screwed-up bodies. As a teenager I followed it every month, it was my favorite; there's always emotional content with the Hulk, too, angry or sad or frustrated. There was one cover with Hulk's face that really stuck with me, the face was split with half of the face changing into the Hulk and half of the face still the regular guy. I can do that sort of thing, part of the body as the Hulk and part still the scrawny guy. It'll be 18" x 24" when finished. I've discovered recently that I love to paint really big. I've done a few murals on gallery walls and I love to do that. Unfortunately, it is harder to sell that kind of work, I'd want to be paid for it. To do a mural as a labor of love . . . [laugh] Prices are a big issue right now, alternative shows are mostly visited by other artists. For my show at Roc la Rue, I knocked my prices down a bit just because it was my first commercial show, but I sold one for $600. At the Market Street Studios firtst open house, I sold a good one, too. Everyone's in my ear to get my prices up, up, up. I do have a goal to make money. The Seattle City Lights Commission awarded me $7500 in 1995, so I took a year off and did lots of cartoons and drawings. Every year they have a competition, you have to write "My Purpose As an Artist", or something like that. [laugh] I broke it into three distinct goals, which has been valuable looking back on it, like a business plan. First, I want to be happy with my work. That's my number one art priority, to be happy with the work I'm doing. Second, I want to be a member of the art community, to contribute and be focused on this locale. Third, I want to make a living, to support myself financially through the production of art. This one is looking up, so I'm happy about that. I'm kind of at a critical juncture, how do I do this? I still have a day job, and I'm happy where I'm at. I'm having this a small taste of success. Fuzzy Engine wants to go national, as well as Roq La Rue, who knows, hopefully it will pan out. It can be daunting, trying to keep up with it all, the deadlines and all. But I do enjoy it, and I've established the lifestyle where I can do it. I was doing it all along, now I'm just getting paid more for it as a fine artist. I hate the stigma of these terms, cartoonist, fine artist. I called something someone else did an illustration, and this guy was like, What? That's fine art! I don't do the strip collaborations anymore, like those with Sparrow and Hal Sirowitz. I couldn't do it all so that went by the wayside. The stuff I was doing for zines . . . well, what's changed is that it's color. I relied on black and white for so long, now I'm like, I'm not gonna use black. I think that people respond better to color. From 1996 to 1997 I was the operations manager for Soil (an artist run collective in Seattle), I had a solo show there. A local art critic came in, This is so hard to appreciate, your work is too American. She was Asian. It was depressing to me, the first person who comes in is this critic and she doesn't like it, but she didn't publish that. It was a great show and a good success in spite of those comments. You say my work seems so meticulous . . . yeah, I love to paint elaborate very small patterns in my work. The dots have that quality, but more planned; the squiggilism is more organic. I would love to take a year to do one small painting. It's a layering process, I can keep adding stuff but it doesn't get overworked. There's still a hard edge, it doesn't get muddy. Clean and sharp, that's my aesthetic. The dots are brushwork, from years of practice. My process for now is different from five years ago. To do it with color is a different thing, with black and white it's just easier to keep that hard edge. Even a lot of my black and white art for zines was with acrylics. Now with color I'm more aware of viscosity and how to work it. I've been experimenting for years with it all, to get clean and sharp with color. I'm at the point where, for one aspect of the painting I have to mix for one specific characteristic. Even that is meticulous. How you store the paint and take care of it . . . it's part of being happy with my work. Little housekeeping things help make sense of it, but that's the fun part. [laugh] I'm gonna read some of Hal's stuff at the reading for the zine library. For our collaborations, Hal would write the poem then give me ideas for how the panels should look. I met him through Sparrow, who I corresponded with. I've met Hal in person, but only corresponded with Sparrow. I'm not much of a traveler, and I don't drive. I drove in high school, but in Seattle a car took too much energy and finances. I was just barely scraping by to be able to do the sort of art that I wanted, making just enough for food, rent and art supplies. So now anything I sell is like pure gravy. Cartooning is hard work. Painting is more fluid, it comes out more naturally. There's more freedom to call my own shots, it's not as strict as cartooning. I like the idea that Artists are all part of a large community, regardless of tastes and style. Roq La Rue Gallery Kirsten Anderson, Gallery Director 2224 Second Ave Seattle Wa 98121 www.roqlarue.com 374-8977 Zine Archive Project Zine Library at The Richard Hugo House Victoria Howe, Curator 1634 11th Ave Seattle WA 98122 206 322-7030 Fuzzy Engine at the Market Street Studios Walter Wright, Gallery Director 2801 Market Street Seattle Wa furfaust@wolfenet.com Blair Wilson POB 12368 Seattle, WA 98111 http://members.aol.com/Fhtb/index.html fhtb@aol.com