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When I was in my early twenties I was doing tenant organizing - rent strikes, specifically - in my building. I think that was how I started doing poster art. It was something very concrete.

Eric Drooker

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Eric Drooker
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Comics Artist
Painter
New York City
New York
Thinking
Strikes
Tenant
Twenties
Tenants
Early
Poster
Building
Organizing
Started
Posters
Art
Rent
Something
Specifically
Think
Concrete

More quotes by Eric Drooker

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There's the fact that animation is extremely time-consuming, tedious, labor-intensive, and therefore, extremely expensive as an art form to really do it right, to really do full animation.
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With what we've been taught is the proper role of art, which is that you want to have it very neatly matted and framed and put on a white wall in some room where only a certain class of people are going to go in.
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The client isn't quite satisfied and then the prostitute is always unsatisfied but is doing it just to make ends meet. And if you're doing fine art, if you're doing it for a gallery or a museum, it's so sterilized. It's such an antiseptic environment.
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Poster art was always my way of being involved in the conversation. So it wasn't just a one-way conversation with the police yelling at us or freaking us out. Street posters allowed you to have the last word.
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When I was younger, when I was a teenager, the work was more satirical and funny and cartoony. And part of it was chops - if you have a more limited repertoire of stick figures and cartoon characters, they lend themselves more to humor than to tragedy.
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Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them ... art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself.
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I try to, at least once or twice a week, have someone over and model, usually a dancer friend or a poet or someone to come over and just stay still for me. Depending on how exhibitionist they are, it will determine the finished work. And I say, You're the muse you come up with it. I'll draw you however you want.
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The art was just a way of hooking people in, saying: Hey, maybe there's something cool about the tenant meeting. If the picture's really cool and weird, maybe I should check this out. And I think all of my art has really developed out of that realization.
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We used to call the 1% the ruling class, but America's never felt comfortable using that terminology. It was taboo to talk about class war. Americans are okay talking about it like this everyone wants to be part of the 99%, even the cops are like, No, no, man. I'm part of the 99% too. No one wants to be part of the 1%.
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We all know artists who like to collaborate, who like to work as a team. It all kind of depends what your habitual working method is.
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There's so much tragedy in people that we see every day that we don't have to make anything up. We don't have to invent anything. There are two items on the menu: comedy and tragedy.
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The trick is not to look back, but keep on expressing where I'm at now. It's challenging to create something new, so it's crucial to dwell in the present moment.
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As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.
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I don't even believe in magic, or ghosts or anything like that, and yet in a city like New York, on the subway, I definitely see ghosts and art seems to have some magical properties.
Eric Drooker
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By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.
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Everyone wants to be part of the 99%, even the cops are like, No, no, man. I'm part of the 99% too. No one wants to be part of the 1%.
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In the U.S., ironically, people work longer hours in the U.S. than they do in Europe or in any other industrialized country. They seem utterly oblivious to May Day, don't really know what it is - our own history.
Eric Drooker
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Street art is about as religious as I get - that's my faith, that even if people screen it out and didn't think they saw it, they did. Even if it was for a split second, it's become part of them and it's affecting them somehow.
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The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been on class war theme. It's been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are. They may have guns and pepper spray and helicopters and F16s and the whole U.S. military on their side, but when it comes down to it, we still have the numbers.
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Illustrators are usually illustrating something big or commercial if not outright advertising. It's a form of prostitution, but that's cool because we don't have any moral hang-up about it.
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