On being an artist and becoming a painter.
Since I was a child, everyone told me "You should be an artist when you
grow up!" I was always drawing. (Drawing:
the fallback for oddball children since the dawn of time.) When I decided
to go to art school, I was determined to come out of it with a viable career and I
was naive enough to think that a four-year art program would kind of guarantee
I popped out with one. I was raised by a single working mom and grew up
with the expectation that I would need to provide for myself because nobody was
going to take care of me. I hadn't given much thought to a major, but
when I got to Parsons "Illustration" seemed fairly practical -- I
could draw and paint AND get paid? Great! And it seemed very well
rounded because I was trained in painting, drawing, concepts, printmaking -- it
was very Bauhaus (the German art school, not the band), you got a little bit of
everything and that really appealed to me because I hadn't figured anything out
yet.
So I put myself into the Illustration program.
And it very quickly started to chafe my chaps -- did I really want to
spend my life drawing pictures of other people's stories when I had so many
stories of my own to tell? Because that is one thing I have always been steeped
in -- I loved to read and write and I loved narrative art that told its own
stories. So I kind of defected and started taking painting classes in the Fine
Art department. Right before graduation I found a job illustrating a very
comprehensive book about preparing Japanese seafood. I had briefly
contemplated dropping out to go study Oceanography (I always adored the sea.) I
had sketchbooks full of fish and sharks, and that got me the job -- doing
something like 70 illustrations for a book called "An Ocean of
Flavor."
It turned out to be a completely pivotal thing
because the job made me more money than I'd ever had at any one time. Some friends
had moved to Lucca, Italy and it all just came together to go spend some time
with them. After a month of steeping in the Italian landscape, culture,
food and wallowing in the art, I came home wanting to be a painter, cook more,
and say "Ciao, baby!" too often.
On Lowbrow, Pop Surrealism and genre talk.
The term “Lowbrow” was confusing to me when I
first heard it -- I thought it was flying eyeballs and cars with flames. I didn't paint anything like that.
The first time one of my pieces showed up in Juxtapoz magazine I did a sort of quizzical sideways doggie head,
"Huh?" It took me a while to realize that "Lowbrow"
was an umbrella term that included a really broad range of art--basically
almost anything that was outside the mainstream--sort of a giant Salon des Refusés.
A lot of people didn't like the title though -- to the point that many
years ago a panel was convened in LA (in the basement of a strip club if memory
serves) with a bunch of artists (myself included) and some art writers, to try
and come up with a better term for what we did. Several people liked
"Imagist" but nothing really stuck. “Pop Surrealism” came along
later, and people seem to like that term better.
It took me a while to realize that "Lowbrow" was an umbrella term that included a really broad range of art--basically almost anything that was outside the mainstream--sort of a giant Salon des Refusés.
My work hasn’t moved in and out of those terms.
Those terms float up in the atmospheric layer, following and trying to define
the art. I just do what I'm thinking about at the time and don't pay much
attention to that stuff. I most definitely do not try to define or place myself,
I just keep a pen handy to jot down ideas when they pop into my head, and if I
still like the ideas later, I paint them. My work changes because I
change. I don't want to be locked into any one style forever. I want to be free
to follow my muse (and trust she knows where she's going.)
On
developing her unique style, surfaces, content and making Art out of objects and objects out of Art.
My work went through a radical transformation
when I was living in New York. When I first got out of college I was
painting these enormous canvases that
were very much “Symbolist” in feel and were largely based on my dreams.
They were loose and dark and weird and huge. I painted the first
lunchbox almost as a joke; it was just this lark of an idea to make something
that I wanted to see but that didn't exist, to make this idea REAL. I've
had a lifelong obsession with Catwoman and Batman, the ultimate unrequited
love, so I thought it would be funny and kind of sexy to make an "adult
lunch box" with really porny images of the two of them FINALLY getting it
on. And that was so much fun I made another. And another. And
another! Then I had a collection of these objects, which I was just
keeping to myself and cracking up friends who visited my studio, when I heard
about an erotic art show in an East Village gallery and thought "Okay,
time to come out of the closet." So I had a buddy shoot some slides
very quickly, ran over there, showed the slides, held my breath... and they
wanted all of them for the show (plus a few I said I had but hadn't actually
created yet.)
After that, painting on canvas was suddenly
utterly boring to me -- stripped of paint, that canvas had no meaning, no
interest. I wanted to bring *more* to objects that people already had a
distinct reaction to, add an extra layer. I really liked the idea of
dragging things from my childhood (lunch boxes, TV trays) into the adult world
with these naughty images. The TV trays were great for the same reason --
people had a history with the object, and it seemed perfect to place TV characters
on these things that often sat directly in front of the TV. (Plus they
were self-framing and nearly indestructible -- bonus!)
Eventually it started to feel like a tin cage
-- I could only paint in 19 x 22 inches rectangles? To heck with that! I
had to break out of my self-created prison, but I'd trained myself to love the
smooth, perfect surface of gessoed tin, so canvas was out of the question.
That's when I started using wooden panels, and suddenly everything was
possible -- big and square! Tiny and oval! Whatever I wanted!
It was scary though -- what if the only thing people liked about my art
was the TV trays? What if that was the most important part and I was
throwing it away? But sometimes you have to just walk off the cliff and
trust it'll work out; hope your muse brought a parachute or one of those
flying-squirrel gliding suits.
I still really like making art that people can
have a different kind of relationship with--different feelings about--that they
can actually hold or display in different ways or even *play* with. I
don't take myself very seriously (that might be obvious) and if something
cracks me up, that's usually a "go" sign for me to pursue it -- whether
it's a painting idea or a collectors’ limited edition porcelain plate.
It's also a way to make art that's "pro populus" -- for the
people. I don't want to only make art for folks who can afford paintings;
I want to make art into fun things that are accessible on some level, in some
way, to anyone who wants it.
On
art history, culture jamming and painting as narrative.
A huge swath of art history is storytelling --
it's possible even cave paintings are just a pre-written-language way of saying
"And then we saw this big bison and it was amaaaazing... " Back
in the day people would look at those big, grand Old Master paintings depicting
well known tales from Greek and Roman mythology or the Bible and recognize the
props, costumes, people and places and that allowed them to be a part of the
story because they were familiar.
I decided to tell stories that would be able to communicate like that
with *my* generation, a generation that grew up with TV as the main source of
entertainment, so I populated my art with characters that *we* grew up with.
I dropped Gilligan and Batman and Jeannie and Morticia Addams into some
of those original paintings and tales because so many of the underlying themes in
them ("I love you even though I'm not supposed to" "I got
martyred just for being me") are really timeless and universal.
It was the same thinking with "The
Wish", which shows Jeannie from "I Dream of Jeannie" as Ingre's
"Odalisque." In Ingres'
day there was a big obsession with Orientalism. People were traveling around
the world and coming back with these amazing stories of things like *harems*
and it just got everybody all hot n' bothered. There was a very similar reaction when "I Dream of
Jeannie" came out -- it was titillating, this idea of a gorgeous genie who
was there at your beck and call. Both the painting from 1814 and the TV
show in 1965 were offering the same tease--"Look! She's gorgeous and
she's there to do whatever you want!" So it seemed absolutely
perfect to me to cast Jeannie as Ingres' Odalisque and pull that thread right
through history.
On creating alternative endings/ alternative narratives for well
known characters.
I'm a very big romantic at heart, so it would
literally give me heart *ache* to think about some of these stories and how the
characters would end up -- alone, pining, broken. Or even just the
absurdity of the extreme chasteness of 60s TV shows -- all these adorable
people prancing about and nobody is gettin' it on?! Puh-leeze! I
started taking it upon myself to "fix" some of them. I read
epic amounts of science fiction when I was a kid and I really do believe in
alternate realities so I'm convinced that in a side-by-side universe to ours,
Catwoman and Batman hooked up and carried on a very frisky, unconventional
romance. And that Goldilocks didn't just run off screaming into the woods
never to be heard from again, but that the bears found her, lost and shivering
in the forest, and that she and Baby Bear grew up together to become true
loves. Then sometimes I'm telling a different story, one about the deep
sadness of personal exile, of monsters who just want love but are so shunned
they can't be seen for who they are inside.
On deciding what makes it onto the panel.
It's kind of a pit fight to the death, like
the Thunderdome in Mad Max. "Fourteen ideas enter, but only one
comes out!" I am constantly scribbling little notes and drawings on
things; some I lose, some I keep, some I find years later. They all
rumble around in my head and on my desk, and the one that emerges victorious--the
one that haunts me, the one I can't shake, the one that keeps making me giggle
or feel really uncomfortable--is the one that's declared winner and gets to be
made real, like the Blue Fairy waving her wand over Pinocchio: "Now
you get to be a REAL painting!"
Check out Isabel on her own blog HERE for another behind the scenes peek.
