fCARBON 14, Issue #15
(email carbon@voicenet.com for back issues)
by Leslie Goldman

I’ve said before in many of my intros that meeting talented and interesting people is a major perk of doing the mag. and it makes a lot of the other bullshit involved worthwhile. Not to repeat myself but life is certainly swell when I can spend an hour or two talking on the phone to a smart, sassy, righteous babe like Isabel Samaras about art, sex, family, TV, the penis and life in general, and call it work. (And write the cost off on my tax return; thanks Len.) My first introduction to her artwork was a piece I saw in Juxtapoz (maybe in Juxtapoz Erotica) called “Corn Porn” which featured a hot hillbilly-esque babe perched upon an ear of corn (riding it really, a la a witch on a broomstick.) Again, not to repeat myself but I love pin-up art and so of course I was attracted to it but (to give credit where credit is due), it was Lisa Petrucci from Something Weird (also an artist in her own right), that suggested Isabel as a possible cover artist to us. It didn’t take much encouragememnt for me to get in touch with her, I saw a couple more pieces of hers on the web, and I knew she would be perfect for a feature. Little did I know how much we would end up having in common, it’s not everyday that I meet another woman who reads Leg Show (for research of course); actually I bet a lot of women read Leg Show but it takes a special kind of woman to admit it (and not be embarrassed). But I digress (as usual)… most of the art featured here focuses on Isabel’s TV and pop culture fascination, but she also has an awesome book out called Devil Babe’s Big Book of Fun! (published by Manic D Press) that features a ton of her devil babe drawings (which are also scattered thoughout this feature) and all sorts of other devilish fun—plus she does ceramics and paintings that don’t feature well-known entertainers and characters; interested parties can check out some of her other stuff on-line (www.devilbabe.com) or in person if you’re living in or visiting one of the places she’ll be showing.
—Leslie

[I turned the tape recorder on while we were talking about collecting.]

I started a long time ago collecting Batman stuff. Because, as you know if you look at a lot my art—

You love Batman.

Yes, I love Batman. And then, really specifically it was about Batman and Catwoman and how that relationship was never allowed to fully develop on the TV show, so therefore I started doing these paintings to kind of work out what I thought should have happened. So I’m collecting all this old Batman stuff from the ‘60s, where he’s wearing his little blue and gray outfits and stuff. And then the first Batman movie came out and suddenly there was shitloads of Batman stuff—it was beyond my comprehension to collect because there was just so much of it. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just collect Catwoman stuff, that’s easy enough.’ But there were only like four Catwoman things available. So I sort of hit the wall, ‘Now what?’ Well, there’s other female toys. And now my studio is floor to ceiling with these things and there’s huge boxes of them in the basement too. And I keep buying them! But I’m a big fan of anything that kind of promotes women kicking ass, metaphorically or literally. So I like some of these battle-axe swinging, metal bustier-wearing…

Oh, OK. Do you like Xena?

You know, I watched the show for a little while, and I’m really happy the show’s out there. I’m glad that it promotes chicks busting skulls but, I don’t know, I watched it for like a season and got it out of my system and now I don’t really need to see it. I mean I’m glad there’s characters on TV right now like Xena ’cause when we were growing up, there were characters like Samantha on Bewitched, who had all these crazy powers but she didn’t use them; she would rather use her hands—what’s up with that?! [Artist note: the show that really does it for me is "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".]

It’s funny you mention Bewitched, because Larry and I were looking at the slides you sent and he was wondering why Bewitched was one of the TV shows or, more specifically, that Samantha was a female lead character, you did not latch onto.

Um, I haven’t done it yet. I have about 40,000 little ideas percolating in my brain at any given moment, and it’s not possible for all of them to swim to the surface. It’s like survival of the fittest, you know, like the strongest and the fastest fights its way to the top, bullies all the other ones out of the way; and that’s what I tend to work on at the time. I have some Bewitched stuff kicking around in my head, I have a whole bunch of Beverly Hillbillies stuff kicking around my head, I have some Avengers stuff kicking around my head because I worship Dianna Rigg as Emma Peel. And billions more and thousands of things that will probably never get made because there just aren’t enough hours in the day. It’s just sort of a roll of the dice inside my skull, with whatever’s gonna come out at any given moment.

[laughing] That’s a great way to put it.

That’s sorta what it feels like, y’know? Little things kinda rattling around and fighting it out, duking it out to see which gets to be the dominant one—the Alpha idea.

That’s great. It’s like self-editing.

Yeah! But it’s frustrating too, because whatever you don’t do—like if you have two or three ideas and you decide, ‘hey, I’m gonna pursue this one’—the ones you don’t pursue sometimes lose their lustre; most of the time they seem to sort of become dusty and not so shiny after a while… sometimes they’re not interesting after you didn’t take advantage of that first spark. But that’s another way of weeding out the strongest and the fittest. The ones that are still interesting weeks later probably were pretty good ideas to start with.

Do you work on more than one piece at a time?

I don’t usually, unless I hit a wall. Sometimes I really… my paintings feel like battlefields to me a lot. You know, you start them and you’re all excited, you’re charging off. Every time I start one, I feel like I go in very naively—like, ‘this is gonna be so fun and this is gonna be so fast, and this is gonna be so easy,’ and then you run smack into these—[laughing] what do they call those sharpened bamboo sticks they put out in the fields to trip you up? You hit some area where you suddenly go, ‘What as I thinking? I can’t paint this! I am nowhere near capable enough of doing this, or pulling this off the way I want it to look,’ or ‘It’s just not matching the picture in my head.’ And sometimes that becomes so daunting that you can’t push through it. Usually the only way I can push through that stuff is force myself to go and do it anyway. Or if there’s a deadline, if I have a show coming up and I don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Well I’ll just do it tomorrow.’ Sometimes I’ve had to put a painting aside and start something else, and then come back to it. But generally speaking I try and just focus on the piece I’m working on and stick with it. Partly because I worry about that same lack of sparkle factor, where if I don’t stick with it, by the time I come back to it I won’t be as interested in it anymore. Each painting is like going through a whole metamorphosis, I look at them and I can track all these things I’ve taught myself how to do as I’ve been going along. So sometimes going back to something that looks really primitive is really hard; I could end up repainting the entire thing! I mean that’s the good thing about the kind of work I’m doing, in a way, is that when I’m finished I glaze them with this really brain-eating sort of urethane glaze—’cause I like them really shiny—and that pretty much negates the possibility of going back into them.

Oh, right. Because once you put that on it’s the point of no return.

Yeah, there’s no noodling around with them. I think I remember reading in some art book in school that—I think it was Rousseau—he would have his girlfriend go into the museum and distract the guards so he could go and work on his paintings once they were already hanging.

Wow.

[both giggle]

Yeah, that’s pretty funny. It’s not an option for me. But that’s good, I think it’s really good that I do something as final as glazing things, because if I didn’t I have a feeling I’d keep pulling them out onto the easel and tickling them around a little. That’s the kind of paintings they are; they’re so minute, the little details are so intense. I mean there’s little tiny things you can’t see on the slides (I sent) that you probably can’t see unless you get like two inches away from the painting—little tiny spider webs and things. I just like to throw little things in for, y’know, somebody who either watches so many hours of a certain TV show that they pick up on them or somebody who’s so intrigued by something that they get that close to it.

That’s cool. At what point did you go from painting on canvases to painting on lunchboxes and the wood trays?

I was painting on canvas in school and those paintings were really huge. When I got out of school—I was going to Parson’s in New York—I was painting on these really enormous canvases in my big artsy fartsy loft, and they were all very sort of symbolist paintings; weird, spooky dreamscapes, just all kinds of weird shit going on. Then one day I did a lunchbox sort of as a joke, because I wanted to. I sanded off, primed and repainted an old tin lunchbox with themes of Batman and Catwoman and Batgirl getting it on. And I loved it. It was so fun, and it looked so cool! This whole idea of a lunchbox, but it’s for grownups—and it’s pornographic! Everybody who saw this thing just adored it so I thought, ‘oh, this is so much fun, I’m gonna do another one.’ So I did the Lone Ranger and Tonto, I did Gilligan’s Island, I did Buck Rogers and some space creatures menacing some big, buxom blond space women, and it just went on and on. And about the same time I moved to California, I was getting frustrated because the lunchboxes required so much work. It was like at least two full paintings, one on each side. Plus, sometimes, whole paintings that wrapped around the waistband of the lunchbox—the sides, the top and the bottom. Sometimes it would be a pattern but sometimes it would be more paintings, so it was up to six paintings in one piece. Because they were so small and they were lunchboxes—they hadn’t become the super-hot collectible items that they are today—people were having a hard time coughing up the kind of money that felt legitimate and fair to me for the work I was putting into them. So I thought, is there something I can put one painting on, but that still has some kind of—I really lost interest in canvas, canvas had no presence on its own; just the canvas, stretched or unstretched, didn’t mean anything to anybody. Nobody looking at it would be interested in it, it didn’t have any history, it didn’t have any… vibration! You know what I mean? The lunchbox did. I think this woman, Eva, actually may have suggested something about a TV tray. And I thought a TV tray was great, because it’s something that’s familiar to me from my childhood, my grandparents had them, I ate on them constantly. The big tin trays with the big folding legs that you just pull up to the couch [laughing a bit] so you can eat food and watch TV all day! I spent quite a lot of time with those things as a kid, so they were very familiar (to me), and they had a lot of resonance and feeling attached to them; they seem perfect—TV trays, TV characters, I mean it couldn’t have been more ideal. And they were so perfect on the wall, they were sort of self-framing. They had these great wavy borders… and they looked really groovy. I think the first TV tray I did was called “The Assumption of Elvis”; and it was a riff on the old classical assumption themes, where somebody’s being lifted up to heaven by little angels and cherubs. It’s Elvis, and he’s this big, green, bloated corpse. He’s got a little blue cape, and all these angels are popping hernias, squeezing their eyes and straining to lift him up to heaven. And the border is all pills. I’ve been doing tin trays for a long time. The game boards, I saw them at the Salvation Army and I thought they’d be great for portraits because the patterning was so nice, and I really wanted to paint a head that was bigger than a postage stamp—as much as I love the trays, sometimes it’s a little frustrating having to paint everything with brushes that are smaller than my nails. So it was fun to do, the gameboards, and paint these big… actually, you can be the first to know, I just bought a bunch of these insane frames; big, gold, sort of the Louvre gone mad, totally intricate, insane frames. And I’m gonna try and do some bigger pieces and smack ‘em into these frames.

Cool.

Yeah, I’m kind of excited. It’s a little scary, I haven’t painted anything larger than a TV tray for… I can’t remember how many years.

Wow.

It’s a little daunting, I have all these frames in the basement and I go down and sort of stare at them and scratch my head and wonder how I’m gonna approach this; what I’m gonna do with them. It just seems like a natural progression for these paintings, ‘cause for the past couple years I’ve been riffing classical masterpieces… I’m excited about it. I’m a little nervous/terrified about working bigger, but I’m excited about it too.

Will you do it on canvas?

See, I don’t know. I did a painting on canvas recently. I have two things going on simultaneously with my work. I’ve got my paintings on trays and gameboards, which is sort of like the haute couture line; they’re kind of expensive, there aren’t very many of them and they’re produced slowly. Then there’s the vox populi, art for the people, which is the Devil Babe stuff; Devil Babe paintings, coloring books are out there, ceramics sometimes… all that stuff is designed to be art that anybody can afford and bring into their home. I did a piece recently that I wanted to be kind of a bridge piece between the two things, and it’s a painting of a Devil Babe—but she’s sort of a Marie Antoinette Devil Babe; she has this enormous white hairdo and this huge taffeta gown and she’s sitting in an embroidered green couch with flowers and roses all over the place. It’s got a big gold frame, an oval portrait style thing. It’s not that big, probably not even 20” high or something. but it’s on canvas because that’s what happened to work with this frame. And canvas sucks! [both laugh] I haven’t worked on canvas since I was in art school and now I remember why; it’s so damn lumpy. Even portrait grade canvas, when you gesso it and sand it a million times to try and build a smooth surface, it still makes me insane. Part of that is because of the size: when I’m working that small with a little brush that has three hairs on it and I'm painting an eyelash, if there’s a bump the eyelash goes ba-bump-bump—which makes me nuts! I get a little bit mental because I’m so used to having these glass-like, smooth surfaces. So in a perfect world, I think that with the smaller of these new frames I will probably work on gessoed masonite because I like that surface a lot; it’s like the tin, it’s smooth. It’s enough just trying to paint what’s in my head, I don’t have to struggle against the surface as well.

Do you enjoy the process of preparing the surfaces to be painted on too?

Not at all.

That’s work for you, you don’t like that part.

I get excited about an idea, I’m like, ‘oh, this is gonna be great!’ And then I have to spend two days sanding off the enamel and then priming and then gessoing and then sanding and gessoing and sanding a TV tray. You can have up to five layers of gesso to get this nice smooth surface on there. So when I’m really in a high production mode or I have the time to be a taskmaster, I have an assistant who will come in and do the dirty work for me—which is great.

That is great.

Yeah, that’s a relatively recent addition to my lifestyle.

That’s cool.

Oh, it’s made such a difference. Because now I can do the part that I like, whereas before when I was done preparing the tray, all I wanted to do was go see movie… now I can actually apply my creative energy to something that’s creative, instead of spending it doing grunt work.

That’s cool. So you make your living off your art.

Yeah, pretty much.

That’s awesome.

Yeah. My goal since I moved to California was to do anything to avoid getting a straight job. So sometimes I do illustration work, sometimes I draw tattoos for people, I do some album covers, rock posters; whatever comes along that isn’t too far off my mark. I’m not that interested in completely pimping myself out. [both laugh] But usually the only people who call me are calling because they like something I'm doing.

And they’re already familiar with what you do.

Yeah. They’re not calling and asking me to do drawings of kids skipping off to school for baloney ads. Thank god, because I don’t think I could do that without going screaming mad.

When you went to art school did you have to major in something?

Yeah, and I had a real problem with that. Funny you should mention that. When you go to art school, and I imagine it’s still the same, the first year they let you dabble in a lot of things. They give you some painting classes, they give you some drawing classes, you get a little bit of this, a little bit of that; to sort of get your feet into different things and let you sample them. Then they make you choose, they go, ‘OK, now choose the path for the rest of your life.’ Of course all kids have to do this when they go to college, and we’re so unequipped to figure this stuff out, but they tell us to and we choose very arbitrarily. When I went to Parsons I had been really interested in printmaking. I had been taking printmaking classes at the Corchoran in Washington, DC before that. I got to Parsons and discovered they didn’t have a print department. Well, they had a print department but not a print major—so I was a little confused. [both laugh] In that case I was really into the process. Printmaking is a lot of scrubbing plates and cranking presses and soaking paper -- for some reason I found that to be very meditative and I really liked it. I guess because it wasn’t like sanding and coughing up all this dust from off these trays, which is not meditative but a real pain in the ass! They didn’t have a print major… but in the Illustration department you got to take painting, drawing and printmaking, and I thought, ‘well that seems fairly well rounded, I guess I’ll do illustration,’ having no idea what I was getting into, except that it seemed fairly practical. I got into that and discovered I really didn’t like it very much because the classes were essentially structured around a process which I was uncomfortable with, which was the teacher saying things like, ‘OK, this week we’re going to do an illustration for an article from The New York Times about the oil embargo.’ I just thought it was a giant snooze and it felt very constricting. I seemed to spending all my time finding ways to do stuff I wanted to do and trying to pass it off as an illustration assignment. Like, ‘yeah, I made all these Mexican and African masks and they’re, uh, ideas for travel posters!’ My whole first two years in the department was all about trying to scam my way past my teachers, so that I could pursue my own interests and still pass these classes. And the school was really bizarre about letting you take classes in other departments. I tried to take painting classes in the fine arts department, and that was really blocked, it was like, ‘No, you can’t do that. We have painting classes in the illustration department that are just fine.’ And, not to slam the school but, they weren’t for me. I did eventually get over into the fine art department for some painting classes and I was very comfortable there. When I graduated I immediately got a job illustrating a cookbook about Japanese seafood, I did like 70 illustrations. It was actually a really fun job because they gave me a sushi budget.

Wow! That’s my dream job!

It was my dream job too. And it paid so well—it was for William Morris—it paid so well that I immediately left the country and went to Italy for a month. By the time I came back I had no interest in doing illustration again. It was sort of this head-shifting moment for me… but the funny thing is that in the long sort of road, the spiral of life, I have now come around full-circle to where I am accidentally doing illustration work again. It’s nothing I ever really intended to do, but now somebody will call and say, ‘We really love that painting you did, can we use it for a poster for an Aerosmith concert?’ And I’m like, ‘Hell yeah! Send the check to… ‘

That’s cool.

I’ve done a few posters like that for Bill Graham, and they’re really fun jobs. So stuff like that is interesting, I mean I didn’t ever expect to found myself doing illustration work again, yet I find myself doing it recently and really enjoying it. Like I said, the people who call me already know what I’m doing and they’re not going to throw something my way that’s the opposite of what I’m already into.

When did you come up with the Devil Babe? She’s kinda your symbol.

Yeah. I don’t know that it represents all of me, it’s like a facet of me. Somebody asked me recently if there’s any connection to Satanism with the whole Devil Babe thing, [laughing] and I cannot stress strongly enough—

[also laughing] For the record.

Yeah. I don’t believe in the devil. If he exists, he’s a Republican, but I don’t happen to really think he’s around. I have no interest in serving his army or whatever… but I don’t believe he has any because I don’t think he really exists!

[both laugh]

Well what does she represent to you, then?

I think it’s about a side of ourselves. It’s like sassiness, you know, moxie; the prankish person that lives inside of you that wants to come out and play. It’s not about doing evil—

Or doing harm.

Right. It’s about doing fun. Sort of reveling in the side of yourself that has sauciness to it, that wants to come out and play! This just keeps coming up, and I guess it’s going to because they are devils, but this whole sin thing—to me sin is in the eye of the beholder, like beauty. I don’t think we should be doing things that hurt or harm other people or things, but as far as sin and evil go in my book—I don’t usually use the word sin except in sentences like, ‘Wow, it would be a sin not to finish that pie.’

[chuckling] Right, right.

But I started doing the Devil Babes when I moved to California—I didn’t do them in New York at all. I didn’t invent devil women. I have researched this somewhat because somebody told me that a person was trying to block everybody except the guy who puts out Robert Crumb’s Devil Girl choco bars from doing devil women. I thought that was kinda funny. He was apparently running around the comic convention in San Diego handing out flyers telling everybody else who does devil women to cease and desist.

Wow, that’s crazy. You’re kidding me.

I don’t think he got very far with it, and I don’t know if it’s true because I wasn’t there, this is just what somebody was telling me.

That’s insane.

Yeah. So then I just started looking around, and these things have been around ever since men noticed women. I think since we took stock of each other we’ve been depicting each other, men and women, as devils—either sexually or not so sexually. But I didn’t really do them that much in New York, when I moved to California I started doing all these ceramics and that’s where the devil gals first started showing up, on ceramic teapots and vases I was making. Because I wanted to make stuff that was sort of the anti-Martha Stewart stuff, what somebody like me would want to pour tea out of. I wouldn’t want a teapot covered with tulips or English ivy or something, I want a teapot that has Elvis and rat skulls and devil women—that kinda thing [laughs].

That’s awesome.

So I started doing these houseware items for the “alternative” set and they were all decorated with devil women and flames, that kind of thing. They sold really well and people kept responding to the devil women in particular, and I just kept doing more and more of them. The more I sort of explored them, the more I started to like them. It’s an idea that grew out of me and then grew all over me—sort of like that kudzu plant or something.

Right.

It kinda took over. [both laugh]

Yeah, but they’re great. They’re fun and powerful and non-threatening all at the same time.

I like that women have responded to them too because when I did the coloring book, in particular, I was a little worried that guys would like it and be like, ‘heh-heh, look at the naked pictures.’

[discussion somehow turns to each other’s mothers and eventually winds around to… ] I am very happy when people are happy. I am totally against this whole idea of personal misery, really against it. And especially as an artist I have always fought this idea that—it’s actually my personal crusade to fight the Van Gogh myth.

Oh, the “tortured artist”?

Yeah. Fuck that. I’m so sick of it. I mean I dated one in college. He was a great guy and I still care about him deeply, but he really seemed to believe that he needed to be in some state of mental misery in order to be creative. And so many people I know feel this way. Screw all these artists who set up this myth, and screw all these people who made other people think there was something romantic about starving or having psychotic breakdowns or living on the fringe of poverty so you can “make your art”; that if you have things or are happy or comfortable or are making money with your work that somehow you’re not being true to your craft—that’s bullshit.

Oh, OK. I’ve encountered some artists like that too. So you don’t feel like you’re selling your soul when you sell a piece of your artwork?

Fuck no! I mean, they’re like my kids and it’s a little bit like giving my kids off to somebody else. But you get over it. When I did my first series of lunchboxes, I priced them astronomically high for where I was in my career at the time, because I really didn’t want them to sell; I wanted them to all come back home to mom. And it took, I think, maybe even a couple of years to get to the point where somebody would say, ‘Hey, I really want to buy that lunchbox but I can’t afford it.’ [laughs] ‘Would you accept…’ It took a while to kind of go, ‘Well, actually that is completely reasonable… ‘. And this idea that if you create your own art and you don’t let it go, I think you’re gonna drown in it, you’re gonna smother in your own work. I don’t think it’s healthy to sit around surrounded by your own work all the time, it needs to get out! Let somebody else enjoy it! I mean, I enjoyed making it, I want… for every painting I do I have this theory that there’s somebody who’s sort of the right person for it. I like when I meet the people who want to buy these paintings, because they get all excited and that excitement is both gratifying and kinda contagious.

That rules!

Yeah, and it’s really fun. I have to get the stuff out there because there’s somebody who is gonna enjoy having it as much as I enjoyed making it.

I’m sure that’s true.

The newest thing to come off my easel is always the one I’m sort of the most attached to at the moment. But when you start working on the next piece it’s sort of easier to let them move out and go on. I mean, what are you doing them for if you’re just gonna keep them all to yourself?

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s hard to understand that, really.

I like having them go out. I’m happy when there’s a few pieces that are on layaway—I do wish people would finish paying them off [both laugh]—but as long as they’re paying for them, I get to keep them and look at them. And that’s kind of cool, because they stick around. It kinda does feel like having kids because they go off and lead these exciting lives and travel more than I do; they go to other cities, see other people, go to shows and have this exciting life—and twice paintings have been stolen out of galleries.

I read in your press about the Star Trek one [“The Final Frontier”], what was the other one that was stolen?

The Star Trek one was stolen and then came back. Because I postered the town with posters that were like, ‘You’ve ruined my life, you lowly shit.’

Yeah, I want to ask you about that Star Trek thing, I’m curious to know why you think THAT piece was stolen.

I have theories… the piece was stolen right from the gallery, which pissed me off. And I put these [posters] up all over town telling the thief that I was severely pissed. Half of the posters were ‘I’m really pissed and I’ll kill you if I ever find you,’ and the other half were really weepy, like, ‘You’ve ruined my life, please give me my little baby painting back.’ And then, two weeks later, the person who stole it left the painting wrapped in grocery bags on the steps of the gallery. The janitor found it when he came in to work in the morning, and there was a note taped to it that said, “Please return to the artist.” So I got the painting back. But meanwhile the posters themselves incited sort of a riot in town, this woman went ballistic. This is up in Ashland, Oregon, and Oregon has a lot of homophobic stuff going on. This woman went nuts, she tried to get the gallery closed, she tried to get the university which ran the gallery to do all sorts of stuff, she tried to get their funding cut…

Was your painting depicted on the poster?

Yeah. And I have to say that when I gave the flyer to the people who were going to be Xeroxing it, I gave them an original and said, ‘you will probably want to put a black box over part of this. It didn’t occur to me, because I was pasting it up quickly, that you might want to cover their dicks.’

OK, because I’m thinking that’s what might be causing all the controversy.

Totally. The chief culprit who was suspected of stealing it before it was returned was this kid people referred to as “Star Trek boy.” Apparently there was one full-out Star Trek fanatic in town, and he hung out at the comic shop.

It was really strange being pilloried in the press by people who I probably hadn’t seen the show and were getting all their information from the folks who were trying to rustle up all this trouble. So I read that Paramount was thinking about suing me and at first I was mortified but and I thought, ‘OK, let’s take it to the mat. I’ll get a lawyer, I defy them to tell me I don’t have the right to express myself this way… ‘ And nothing ever happened.

I think Paramount’s probably smarter than that.

Well, they have a huge franchise with tons of loyal fans. I have to say, I love Star Trek. [both laugh] The reason I even did that painting in the first place is because there’s this whole subgenre of fan fiction that’s been going since I think the ‘60s, called Slash; which is usually annotated as K/S, which stands for Kirk and Spock. It’s all written by women, it’s read almost entirely by women and it all involves sort of an alternate universe where Kirk and Spock are lovers. [Artist' note: slash has since expanded *vastly* and now includes just about every male/male fictional pairing you can image. Ain't love grand?]

Wow.

They used to self-publish this stuff—now you can get it on the Internet—but they used to self-publish it at the copy shop, spiral bind them and sell them at Star Trek conventions. They’ve been doing it forever, and they’re really fun. I think something will have been lost now that it’s mostly on the Internet, though it’s easier for most everybody to get to. They are so fun, they’re hysterically great. They have wonderful artwork that reminds me of the stuff we used to do in high school, like painfully careful pointillist drawings of Kirk and Spock together and really funny rendered pencil drawings of naked Spock with long hair clutching a giant panther [both crack up]. And the stuff inside really spans the gamut from very romantic love poetry Spock or Kirk would have written to each other to ‘the sweat dripping off their balls’ porn; written by women, read by women. It’s completely fascinating to me. So I did this painting and the idea that Paramount would get pissed about it, it’s like I’m just continuing something that’s been going on since the show originated 30 years ago, get off my back! But they never got on my back, which I think was very nice of them. Most of the time I like to think that people aren’t being portrayed in ways that would offend them because for the most part I’m doing this stuff out of a deep love and affection for these characters.

I think people can tell that. I think that in looking at your work, it seems like you really love not only what you’re doing but what you’re portraying.

Yeah, I do. It’s deep inside. I do love all these characters and I love what I do. Again it goes back to the idea of not being miserable. My work is pretty happy. I’m very political but I handle that in a different area of my life; I don’t feel the need to litter my art with my various outrages. I write a lot of letters, I make a lot of phone calls, I have piles of form responses from every Congressman and Representative of every state I’ve ever lived in. I grew up outside of DC, going to a lot of marches, so maybe it was instilled in me that I can and will talk back. Sometimes I feel guilty that I don’t use my artwork as a forum for some of my beliefs, but at the same time it’s like, ‘I’ve got other outlets for that stuff, that doesn’t need to be here.’ There are issues I sort of approach in my artwork, issues dealing with power and sexuality and media; that kind of thing, which is a little more subtle.

Yeah, but that definitely still counts.

Yeah, they’re by no means empty works, but I think you can approach them on several levels. And I think people do.

So what’s coming up for you show-wise?

I’m not entirely sure. There’s gonna be a show at 111 Minna Street Gallery in September...

Oh, is that the “Pop Tarts”?

Yeah, they’re gonna do another Pop Tarts show…

That’s such a great name for the show.

Yeah! It’s gonna be fun, there’s gonna be some really good people in it, and they’re really fun shows; really great art. And that’s a great space, the guy who runs it is great… it’s a big lovefest. That’s gonna be in September.