Tom Stone is an artist living and working in San Francisco. His photography chronicles the lives of many of the homeless youth in that city. The portraits are austere and haunting, and capture personalities that are all-too-often overlooked.

• Alright, so firstly, I’m very impressed by your portraiture. From what I’ve seen, it looks like you focus mainly on homeless individuals. Can you talk about what draws you to them as subjects?

• I was inspired to the work by homeless youth, street kids, throughout my life and from movies like ‘Streetwise’ (1984), which won an Oscar or was nominated, and ‘My Own Private Idaho’, et cetera. And just seeing kids on the street.

  

  Kids with Dolls

  In the case of streetwise, I came at the film from a photoessay done by the filmmaker. So I saw these people current day (at the time) and saw them in shots from the film. That tied into an open question I’ve always had about trying to understand the cycle of poverty, and how these kids end up on the street.

  I’ve worked with real young kids, like at daycamps when I was younger, and would think, “Ok, three of these kids will end up homeless. And maybe will be in just a few years!” Anyway, I was interested in that cycle.

• That’s interesting. I think your photos share a pathos with Walker Evans’ work with James Agee in ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’.
• I get that.
• And I think the defining element is the extreme candor of the portraits, catching these subjects in their in-between moments which are truly illuminating. Can you talk about how you get your subjects so comfortable with your presence and the presence of the lens?

• As I’ve stated on my site and elsewhere, I take great inspiration from Dorthea Lange, while my work also overlaps a bit with those you mention. And certainly other more modern aspects draw stuff from the likes of Arbus, et cetera. But clearly my process is far different. Technology just makes everything different.

  I work with a D200 and D300 alternately, but I usually have a very small lens, like the 50mm f/1.8, whatever it is. Sometimes I need a larger lens if I want to do something wider or such, but I’m really focused on minimizing the camera.

  As I mentioned before, I was drawn to this by a desire to understand the cycle of poverty. That means I’m in it for the story, and so the interaction is really about that: the story. So we just talk about motivations, and anger and love and whatever, and family and parents and friends. I connect with that stuff. Everyone does of course, and I try to catch it with the camera as we go. But it’s never about the camera.

• And how do you meet your subjects? Just on-the-street encounters?

• Yes, on the street, but chosen encounters. Every I shoot is unposed of course. But that doesn’t mean I’m not setting up the interaction. I notice folks who have expressive eyes and faces that tell a story. That’s obvious, I guess. And then I just double about and figure out how to come up to them based on sunlight and activity, et cetera.

  Realistically, it’s more instinctive that some calculus or such. Basically I’m deciding various stuff as I go up to them, say Hi and address them based on what drew me to them, and let them take it from there.

• So you’ve said that you’re drawn to the question of how this cycle of poverty is perpetuated. Do you see your art as a method of addressing the issue, or just documenting it? Or is this even a meaningful distinction at all?

• The point of the art is definitely to participate. I’m not big on documenting for the sake of documentation. That seems more bureaucratic than artistic.

  

  Dexter

  I’m in it to make a point, and to make a connection, through me, to the audience. And to force consideration and understanding, and discomfort with the way things are. Now I’m not going to stand here and say this is that or whatever policy is good or bad. It’s not about that. It’s about people. And when people care, don’t be surprised by a groundswell of good. Might just happen.

• Well I think that definitely comes through in your work. There is a very evident driving morality to my eye.
• But I try not to moralize.
• Right. It’s moral in the sense of compassion, I think.
• I write stories. But I try to keep my specific point of view in check, let the situation and person speak for themselves as much as possible. Though obviously as an artist, there’s a presentation.
• Certainly. Have you always photographed homeless individuals, or did you have another entry point into photography?
• The photography was about poverty. I was working on maybe doing a video documentary on streetkids, and the photography was the research tool for that. I was surprised when it stood on its own.
• Well, that’s a valuable accident then.
• Indeed. But in-line with my intent.
• Reading your online bio, I see that you’ve had a career in business as well as art. Can you talk some about the relationship of the two, and how you manage to juggle them? And what, if anything, binds them together?

• I guess it’s maybe a bit odd, but my “eye” comes from my days in technology and banking. Perhaps that’s a bit overstated. But I’ve learned to sort the good from the bad pretty quickly and obviously I’ve been an artist since I was a kid.

  But whether at Morgan Stanley or elsewhere, well, you’re always marketing. And you’re always worrying about presentation. And you’re always thinking about the audience I guess. Now obviously fine art and photography, et cetera, is business. But I have a difficult time merging the two. I kind of wear one hat or the other.

  So I prefer others to deal with the business stuff. Anyway, maybe that almost answered, or got along the way.



Very Bad Things

• That makes sense. Do you see yourself doing anything else with your work? Like, you mentioned that your photos sarted as studies for a film. Is that still an interest or pursuit, or are you more or less immersing yourself in photography now?

• I’m certainly interested in film, but it’s different and not really a part of this. In film, I’m more of a director or producer. Not really a cameraman. Which is to say, I’m not much of an artist with a motion camera. WIthout a lot of other people and processes involved. And at a level I like to be comfortable doing everything myself before I farm it out.

  Anyway, with the poverty, what I’m interested in more is organizing ways to help people, as opposed to merely figuring out more ways of telling the story. And there’s certainly other stories I’m interested in telling.

• Well hey, that pretty much does it for my questions. Is there anything you want to add?
• All good!
• Well thanks a lot, we really appreciate your taking the time to talk. One last little question: when you look at the Duckrabbit logo, what do you see first, a duck or a rabbit?
• A duck. It was fun; take care!

Jessica Tam is an artist living and working in New Haven, where she is pursuing an MFA from Yale University. We met her at Yale’s Open Studios, and are very happy that she agreed to take the time to talk to us about her work.

• Alright, well first of all thank you for agreeing to talk to me. We really appreciate your time.
• It’s my pleasure, thanks for asking me. It was great talking with Tempest during Open Studios.
• So the first thing that strikes me as I look at your work is the interesting mix of media that you employ. Can you say something about how you choose your tools and style when you’re starting something new?

• My background is working with paint, typically oil, on stretched canvas. This year, I learned how to make monotypes, which really informs my work. I felt a bit stuck when making the paintings, and so printmaking really saved the day.

  For the monotypes, I work with oil based inks on plexiglass, and I utilize a variety of tools to diversify my mark-making. I use toothbrushes, rubber spatulas, my fingers, and spray bottles in addition to various brushes. I also use quite a bit of paint thinner when I make the monotypes.

  Recently, I started treating my paintings like monotypes. I’ve actually used etching ink directly on stretched canvas. So I’m using paint rollers as I would brayers on the plexiglass, and I’m doing a lot of smudging and pours, like I would for the monotype.

  It helps that I have a slick surface that mimics the plexiglass – in this case, I make a smooth oil ground on canvas or linen. The paintings also have oil paint in addition to the printing ink.



• Interesting. It sounds like, from the way you talk about it, that the texture of the surface is as important as the visual texture?
• Yes, I’ve found that I need to have a smooth surface to work on. I employ a lot of subtractive mark-making methods in my work, such as wiping, and that’s just easier when I have a smooth surface. Sometimes I paint on pearlized paper, which is very slick. In terms of building up texture, I’m interested in doing that with the paint, when is something that I don’t get with the monotypes. It’s not as apparent in the current series of paintings and prints, but in my work from last year, I focused on exploring different textures and surfaces that could be made from candy and spices to dirt, peat moss, and pebbles. Even though the current body of work doesn’t have those elements in them, what I learned about building up various surfaces and varying marks is present.
• That makes sense. So, another thing that really jumps out at me is the boxing theme of some of your work. What’s with the pugilism? Are you a fan of the sport?

• That question always comes up when people look at the work for the first time. I definitely talked about this quite a bit during Open Studios. I’m actually inspired by images from wrestling photography, but the work is so abstracted from the original images, that I can understand how some people think about boxing more than wrestling. George Bellows’s “Stag at Sharkey’s” is often referenced.

  In fact, I am not a fan of either sport. However, I was always a fan of the Bellows painting, and I have a good friend who is a huge wrestling fan and I just couldn’t understand it. I think it’s my initial fascination with the fans that actually got me interested in making work about wrestling – in that way, I hoped to understand it as I made work since I see my studio practice as research of various topics, and why not something that I hadn’t had much exposure to?

  So about three-four years ago, I started making paintings based off of images of comtemporary wrestling. I made these paintings as a way to make myself laugh. I was intrigued by these big, burly men who are supposed to be uber-masculine in really colorful spandex. What I was really interested in were the narratives created to entertain audiences, very much like soap operas, only these were live and involved physical violence.

  So I started with really colorful paintings that placed wrestlers in the jungle or standing in interiors with grandmother-y wallpaper just to see what would happen if I took them out of the ring and put them in a different context.

  My friend Eddie, who is knowledgeable about the sport, took me to a match in Chicago. I looked like such a nerd doing “research.” I was there with my camera and sketchbook. It was an incredible experience, just watching what goes on inside and outside the ring.

  This year, I started making work based on ’70′s black and white photos of wrestling matches. So the tone has changed. There’s a grittier feeling to the dynamic bodies, and the figures are more abstracted than in the earlier work. My current interest in wrestling links the sport to Greek tragedies and my interest in theatrics.

  The wrestler Bronko Lubich said that he thinks that “the real temperaments of men come out in the ring.” So that fine line between what’s real and what’s not is interesting to me.

  

• That’s really interesting. I think that the abstraction works really well, and I get a pretty immediate appreciation for the movement and light, and the form of the spectacle.
• Thanks! That’s what I hope to convey.
• You seem to have extremely varied sources of inspiration for your work. I see on your CV that you got a BA before going back to school for an art degree. Can you tell me about what you studied, and whether you think it has influenced the sort of source-domains you look to in creating your art?

• I was all over the place when I was an undergraduate student. I entered school as pre-med, and was planning on majoring in biology. I later realized I was spending more time in the studio than I was studying for orgo, so I switched my major junior year to studio art. Even though I ended up majoring in studio art, I felt like I had started so late and still had a lot to learn, so I later took studio classes for a year and a half in Chicago. I don’t think my initial interest in medicine is that remote – I’ve retained an interest in the body, which is something that is always present in my work.

  To be honest, I wouldn’t have made a good doctor. I’m scared of needles. I should have recognized that sooner.

• Well, so you’ve mentioned wrestling, Greek tragedy, and anatomy among your influences. If you had to characterize the theme, or arc of your work, something that encapsulates all of this, what would you say?

• I’m still trying to articulate that clearly for myself, and so far, I’ve learned that I’m interested in the stage as a location to entertain and present the consequences of extreme human actions, such as violence. In the instance of American professional wrestling, this stage is the ring. The wrestling photos are a jumping off point.

  Also, my interest in the body presents itself on several levels: that of the figures depicted in the work, my body in the studio, and the viewer’s body in relation to the work. In one of the current paintings, the viewer stands in the middle of the wrestler’s crotch, which is not where we are typically positioned.



• Definitely not. I guess, backing it up a step, I’d like to ask what you think of graduate school as a step in an artistic career. Has it been important for you in developing your interests and styles, and do you think the system in general conduces to good preparation for life as an artist?

• Some argue that graduate school isn’t necessary for the artist’s education- that an artist might as well spend the time in the studio. I think it depends on the person. For me, I saw the graduate school experience as a way to speed up the research process that was already in practice in the studio. It’s such an intense two years.

  I’ve met so many people in the artistic community, and that’s really what I think it’s about – the people. I can find a colleague walking through the halls late at night and ask can for an opinion on what I’m working on, or just start up a conversation about an earlier critique. I often say the most interesting discussions are often the “post-crit crit” that happen informally among faculty and students. This experience, of course, can happen outside school, but I think it takes more time to develop those working relationships. I’ve found these past two years as being integral to my development as an artist. It’s not for everybody, and I think it also varies from program to program.

• On your bio that you sent me, you mentioned that you received a fellowship to work in Europe. Can you tell me about that?
• Yes! I recently learned that I have the privilege to be part of a summer residency program at the American Academy in Rome. It will be my first time in Italy, and I am very excited to go, not only to make work but to also travel and soak in a new environment. There’s so much religious imagery there, which often combine a heightened emotion through physical struggle, so I think the trip will really inform my work. The humanity in wrestling is shown similarly through a rich blend of tones. I can’t wait!
• Well, I wish you luck with that. It sounds like a pretty unique opportunity.
• Thanks, I’m excited to see how my work will develop after the influence of this trip.
• Alright, well that pretty much wraps it up for my questions. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
• No, I think that was pretty comprehensive. Thanks so much for this discussion!

• My pleasure. Oh, one more thing.

  When you look at our logo, do you see a duck first, or a rabbit?

• Rabbit. I can easily see the duck though too. But I saw the rabbit first.

As many of you know, the NYPH was this weekend. Alex and I missed out on most of it, managing to make it to the Slideshow Potluck, but that was about it. However, I’ve been following coverage of it, and by far the most comprehensive, illustrative, and interesting write-ups have been on aphotostudent.com


Check it out.


Additionally, there were a lot of amazing participants, and I wanted to pass along some of their websites:

Tina Enghoff

Sally Gall

Scott Irvine

Ken Kitano

Michael Macioce

And a few cool non-monochrome:

• Braschler Fischer
• Osang Gwon
• James Pomerantz (see the ‘remote control’ series)

Dawn Clements’ large drawings bear the scars of her process. Wrinkled, torn, and dirty, they mark an artist who physically throws herself into her work by kneeling on paper, dragging it across the room to a better perspective, and unceremoniously folding it to access the center. The completed drawings are never framed, but hung raw; thin, white, crumpled paper with surprisingly intimate ink renderings covering the surface. Concurrent to Clements’ process, the viewer has to physically maneuver the drawing, crouching and craning in turn. Thus, the works become as much sculpture as drawing in their physicality. But what makes Clements’ work endlessly fascinating is the way that it envelopes the viewer into her world. In J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Franny becomes obsessed with a religious mantra. This mantra, when performed constantly, will allegedly incite religious feeling in the reciter. Similarly, when a viewer of Clements’ work becomes suitable absorbed in the details, she begins to experience the piece not as a viewer, but as the artist. The participation is no longer rote, but instead, active.

Recently, Clements’ work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. She has been interested in panoramic domestic interiors, either her own dwellings or film compilations from the 40s and 50s. The piece in the Whitney, Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s, is a ball-point pen drawing from the film My Reputation. As is characteristic of Clements’ work, the perspectives within the piece shift and merge into each other, creating an unsettling landscape. Clements always draws from a source, and thus her film panoramas are drawn from different scenes; a detail here, a detail there. Large expanses of white indicate the areas that are never revealed. Her from-life domestic scenes offer the same differences in perspective, a result of her physically moving around the space to get better views of things. There’s a distinct tempo to her work–the white or more linear areas are read fairly quickly, but are often sandwiched between detail-laden expanses that demand time. In an interview, Clements says that she wants her work to feel as if it “existed in a bigger space of time. Like Cinema, it moves and the experiences takes time and that maybe is slower. Some works of art are slow; they walk instead of run. I think a lot of my work is slow.”

At Clement’s latest show, she drew on-site until the day of the opening. The completion of the image was thus marked not by its compositional completion, but by time. The gallery, Boiler Gallery, has, fittingly, a large boiler taking up one of its four walls. Clements chose this as her subject and meticulously recorded the rust and grime that lay upon its surface. The bottom of the paper is heavily detailed. Drawn with a brush, the ink is so thick it feels heavy. Sparse and linear pipes lead us upward, and a peppering of unreadable sentences are intermixed with the topmost drawing. One begins by engaging with a particular detail in the dense regions until another attracts, and they form a sort of path through the work. Undoubtedly, this is the same path the artist took to draw the object. One finds herself as entranced with a line or a shape as the artist herself was, as delighted by a passage, as fascinated by the graphic quality of the ink. Clements’ true talent is how her work acts as a conduit rather than a barrier between herself and the viewer. Her drawings are so personal that they become universal.

There is a wonderful moment when, upon turning from the drawing, you are confronted with the actual boiler and find yourself running your eyes along the same path the drawing took, viewing it from Clements’ perspective. Through this she transcends the drawing and lingers, interpreting your next few steps through the world.

Dawn Clements is represented by Pierogi Gallery and is showing in the Whitney Biennial through May 30th.

For the third installment of our series of interviews with black-and-white comics artists from last month’s MoCCA Festival, we have Joan Reilly, an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. She is a member of Deep6 Studio, and co-editor of the upcoming anthology, The Big Feminist BUT.

• Can we start by having you say something about this upcoming anthology, The Big Feminist BUT?

• It’s an anthology of comics about the confusing/empowering state of womanhood in the 21st century. The idea for the book was conceived by my co-editor, Shannon O’Leary (who previously edited a comics anthology called “Pet Noir” of stories about true crimes involving animals).

  We are still compiling stories for it, but we have quite a few in the can already, written and drawn by some very talented artists and writers.

  The original title was “I’m Not a Feminist, BUT…” Because women of our age and younger find themselves saying that a lot, as a weird disclaimer, because feminism has a pretty bad connotation with most people. But some of our contributors took issue with that title, because they really do consider themselves feminists, no buts about it.

  Still, I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the word myself–it just feels dated somehow.



• Would you say that the project is, in some way, an exploration of exactly that kind of discomfort? With words themselves, and how people react to them?

• Yes: That’s exactly what it’s about. And that makes the range of stories and possible content really endless and interesting.

  It’s funny because I was sitting at my table at MoCCA recently, watching people pick up the little preview mini-comic we were selling, and they would read the title and then put it down again, and I was thinking, “Man–we would probably sell a lot more copies if we took that word “feminist” out of the title.” But then I realized that I was illustrating the need for this type of book and this type of discussion.

• That seems to illustrate a really interesting tension, between saying what needs to be said and what people are comfortable with hearing (and also, of course, buying).

  To what extent to you see this sort of thinking, be it about politics (in the broader, non-derogatory sense of that word), philosophy, gender identity, et cetera, influencing your work as a whole? I mean the stuff that doesn’t explicitly use words like ‘feminist’?

• Hmm…I guess having been born into a pretty liberal, intellectual family, and growing up in the SF Bay Area of California, I am hugely influenced by the mindset of constantly challenging conventions of the past, and looking at the cultural trends that are pointing toward the future.

  But I definitely do not think about that consciously when I’m doing my creative work–it is just there, as part of the background, part of the DNA I guess. When I working on a new project, I’m primarily interested in expressing myself honestly, and not adopting some sort of pretense, or relying on someone else’s ideas or styles of communicating.

• On the topic of the creative process, can you say a bit more about where you “start from”? That is, do you generally have an image in mind, or a situation, or a specific character you want to flesh out? Can you even distill it down to these kind of specifics?

• I usually start from a moment that is interesting to me–a memory from my own life, or sometimes a story someone else has told me, but something that I think deserves to be told. Then I think about the larger structure of the story, and how to illustrate it.

  And sometimes, several such “moments” or memories will converge in one project, like with the graphic novel I’m working on now.

  It’s a story about a sloth/girl living in Red Hook, Brooklyn and struggling with creative block and depression, and it combines my interest in the neighborhood of Red Hook with my desire to see/read/create a really good, interesting, funny, communicative and helpful graphic novel about what it’s like to be depressed, both for people who have experienced it, and people who haven’t.

• That sounds very interesting. I look forward to seeing it.
• Thanks! There will be a 6-page preview of it in the Fall 2010 issue of Cousine Corrinne’s Reminder–a literary magazine based in Brooklyn.



• I know that you’re a founding member of Deep6 Studio. Could you tell me a bit about what that is?

• It’s a group of six cartoonists that originally had nothing in common other than being comics professionals who knew Dean Haspiel, and when Dean decided that he was sick of working at home alone all the time, he rounded up a bunch of us who felt the same way, and we started looking for studio space together. We ended up in this great building directly under the subway tracks in Gowanus, Brooklyn. And in the few years we’ve been there, several other rooms have been rented by cartoonists, so that now we have a pretty sizeable community of artists working under one roof.

  This community has fostered a lot of collaboration, and we’ve been able to team up and tackle large projects that would take one individual forever to complete.

  It is a very supportive environment, and it has been a huge help in making me more productive.

• This is interesting to me, especially given all the talk about the Internet making location more or less obsolete. Do you feel like there’s anything consciously “retro” about this kind of set-up? Also, is this something that you think would be replicable in someplace that isn’t New York?

• Yeah, it is funny in that way–it sort of goes against the whole “virtual office” concept. We definitely weren’t trying to be retro, but the very process of making comics–sitting down at a table and drawing on a piece of paper–is pretty darn retro, and perhaps it’s the physical immediacy of that process that makes us want to do it in the same room as a bunch of other people who are doing it, too. Suddenly, with all these other people around, drawing, erasing, struggling, cursing, it seems a lot less lonely and weird and a lot more fun.

  Of course, we’re not a bunch of Luddites, either–we are all super-connected to the online life, but this way we get to have real human interaction as well.

  Regarding the question of whether this could happen anywhere besides New York, I would say absolutely! I know of several other studios like ours in various places around the country, and most of them existed before we ever thought of it.

• I guess I’ll back up with a more general question here, though it has to do with non-Luddism at least. How do you see the digital platforms that are now proliferating changing the comic world? For better or worse, or just different? And how do you think we’ll be reading/viewing comics in, say, ten years from now?

• I think the digital platforms for comics are a very positive thing. I am really excited about the idea of being able to sell my work via Comixology or iTunes. I never would have believed that this new concept of giving away free online content could work as a business model if I hadn’t seen it work with my own eyes: My studiomates at Deep6 are all involved in an online comics collective called Act-I-Vate, which began as a lowly blog, and has become an online destination, and a publishing entity in its own right. They recently published a good old-fashioned printed book collection, called the Act-I-Vate Primer, which was recommended in the NYTimes Holiday Gift Guide, and got a lot of press in general, and several of the individual artists involved have parlayed their online creations into publishing deals, both digital and traditional.

  I think there will always be comics as physical objects, but there will simultaneously be more and more exciting and innovative ways to read/experience them digitally. I don’t think humans have yet evolved so far as to believe that the physical art object has no beauty or value, but maybe that physical form is evolving to include technology within it, so that covetable “books” of the future will be hybrids of analog and digital beauty.

• So, one more question, which you can answer or not. I don’t want it to seem like I am trying to pigeon-hole you as a “feminist artist” or anything, so we can nix this if you want, but: Do you have any general comments about women in the comics industry? Surveying the crowd at MoCCA, it definitely looks like the medium has largely transcended the pimple-faced teenage boy stereotype (if that ever really fit; I’m not sure!), and that a large portion of the readership must be female. How does this reflect on the creative side?
• Speaking from my own experience going to alternative, independent comics shows like SPX, MoCCA and APE for the last decade, there are definitely more female creators showing up to the shows now, and making their presence known. I remember back in 2000 feeling a bit out of place at SPX, because I was part of a very tiny female alt-comix creator niche population, but that is totally ancient history. Obviously, I don’t know the actual numbers, but it seems like the male-to-female ratio is on a much more even keel these days, which is as it should be! We always need more good stories and good art, from any and all points on the gender spectrum.
• Alright, well that pretty much wraps up what I’ve got. Anything else you’d like to say?
• Just that I appreciate the invitation to be interviewed–this was fun. Thanks!
• Our pleasure. Oh, one more last thing: When you look at the Duckrabbit logo, do you see a rabbit first, or a duck?
• Duck, definitely.