Molly Crabapple
Sketching in general - anywhere, not just in Gitmo, but in life, in the world - is a profoundly disruptive act. Because you're creating something when you're kind of expected to consume or sit passively. I've always sketched things as a way to get into them, whether it was a fancy nightclub or, you know, to have kids think I was cool, whatever.Collection: Cool
Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.'Collection: Funny
Sketching is like dancing. It's process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that.
I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they're - have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own bed, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student. I was a brat. If I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself.
The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.
I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.
The first time I made any money, I was 27. I went to Bergdorf's looking like a proper guttersnipe and bought a pair of Louboutins. I'd wear them and an old ink-stained kimono and make my drawings and feel indomitable.
I've become increasingly agoraphobic.
I travel so much that when I'm not traveling, I'm just kind of curled up in a ball here, not wanting to leave or see anyone.
Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.
I think Picasso was someone who took art's powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That's something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.
Art is much more confined by materials than writing is.
Historically, the women who have been the great painters of the canon have very often have been the wives or daughters of supportive men. Like Artemisia, whose father was a very established painter. I will say that the two current contemporary artists I admire the most are women: Kara Walker and Swoon.
My technique of working is I go around with my iPhone and with my sketchbook. I take thousands and thousands and thousands of iPhone photos. I also draw from life. I can draw really, really, really fast. It's a way that I build a rapport with people.
My real name - my real name is Jennifer Caban.
I grew up in Far Rockaway and then Long Island.
I'm an artist and a journalist. I travel around the world very often for 'Vice Magazine,' and I draw and I write about prisons, about conflict zones.
When you're an outsider, you don't have loyalties to anyone, so you can be cruelly honest if need be. The more you get inside, the more you are involved in polite networks of professional coercion that make people less honest.
When you live in New York and are an artist and are interested in people, you meet a lot of people.
You're demonstrating your own skills in a vulnerable way when you draw.
I was involved in Occupy Wall Street as a participant and poster artist. 'Shell Game' is an attempt to do something bigger, to use whatever artistic powers I have to explore the excitements and betrayals of that year.
The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.
No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more.
I'm only the third artist who's ever drawn at Gitmo.
Art is for the elite because it has a very high price-point of entry. And when one is in that social strata, they look down at illustrators because they just draw things directly for a few hundred dollars, and that's seen as being a bit grubby. Galleries allow artists to stay relatively divorced from the financial aspects of their trade.
I am lucky because I do fine art, and that is half of my living. And then illustration provides the other half.
Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you.
If there's a theme in my work, it's that I like to focus on smart people who are facing oppression and who are fighting back against it.Collection: Smart
You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.Collection: War
When I started my own business, I funded it as a naked model. I still think that the sex industry can, for some men and women, be a powerful tool for improving their financial prospects.Collection: Sex
Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.Collection: Hurt
I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist.Collection: Perspective
Neutrality and boredom are the weapons of the state.Collection: Boredom
The thing that I hate is that Nicholas Kristof style of writing where it's like, "I saw the poor, they made me so sad. What can I do about sadness? I am so brave." It's just like, shut up, man, shut up.Collection: Hate
When you hold a graphic novel in your hands, you're holding artist blood made ink.Collection: Artist
I feel like the traditional patron system meant that you would kiss the ass of one rich person and then hide all of the financial goings-on of your work, and you could pretend you were pure.Collection: Kissing
Art is for the elite because it has a very high price-point of entry. And when one is in that social strata, they look down at illustrators because they just draw things directly for a few hundred dollars and that's seen as being a bit grubby. Galleries allow artists to stay relatively divorced from the financial aspects of their trade. I am lucky because I do fine art, and that is half of my living. And then illustration provides the other half.Collection: Art
The thing is, Guantánamo is also a naval base, and they're under the delusion - especially the people on the naval side who are not dealing with the prison - that they can just pretend this is an ordinary Caribbean naval base. For them, it's: "Why are you making such a big deal out of the most notorious prison in the world?" It's like if people living near Buchenwald said they wanted to talk about the other lovely things in the region besides the camp.Collection: People
Despite everything we know about photo manipulation, a photo is still considered an objective document.Collection: Manipulation
A woman’s beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We’re meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we’re fat. Beauty is Zeno’s paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it’s not socially acceptable to admit we’re there. We can’t perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming 'nice tits.Collection: Nice
Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do.Collection: Writing
Mainstream feminism might remember that the war on women always starts with the war on whores.Collection: War
I absorbed the lie that any smart woman would use birth control and be responsible for her body. Obviously that's not true.Collection: Lying
The truth is, the vast majority of medical care for lower income people in America is shitty. If you go to a free clinic to receive any form of care, the majority of those will be overcrowded with nurses who are tired because they have to work with so many people. We are not a country that invests public money into taking care of poor people, so we usually rely on clinics with very overburdened and underpaid staff.Collection: Country
I didn't want to be beholden to one person. So I did something where I had hundreds of people who backed the work. I could just do work, and since a lot of people were interested in it, I wasn't beholden to any particular one of them.Collection: People
One thing about Guantánamo, beyond anything else, is the commitment against all odds to allow Americans to view themselves as the good guy, no matter what the situation is.Collection: Commitment
Maybe you shouldn't be working as a jailer in Guantánamo. Maybe that's why you feel spiritually unhealthy.Collection: Unhealthy
I hated being a child because to be a child means that you are essentially the property of your parents, benevolently or not.Collection: Children
Innocence is always the state of being untouched. Sometimes it's synonymous with virginity, so sometimes it's quite literal, but sometimes it's more of a mental state of being untouched, of not having seen a lot of the world.Collection: World
The main difference between illustration and comics is that comics are much, much more work. Every comics page is the equivalent of six to nine illustrations.Collection: Illustration