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Americans didn't really have any experience with something as basic as community.

Eric Drooker

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Eric Drooker
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Comics Artist
Painter
New York City
New York
Basic
Americans
Community
Experience
Didn
Something
Really

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.
Eric Drooker
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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.
Eric Drooker
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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%.
Eric Drooker
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If I do a picture, I want the audience to be the people I was just packed against on the subway or on the street, walking on Fourteenth Street. I don't want it to be some narrow public that I myself feel alienated from.
Eric Drooker
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People don't work in factories, [they aren't] big muscular guys. The working class is flabby because they're sitting in front of a computer all day, but it's still their labor being extracted.
Eric Drooker
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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.
Eric Drooker
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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.
Eric Drooker
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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.
Eric Drooker
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Artists always live in the cracks anyway, whatever culture they're in. They're usually accustomed to not having much money, to kind of roughing it.
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.
Eric Drooker
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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.
Eric Drooker
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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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Working people are working even longer hours, even though we won the eight-hour workday at the Haymarket General Strike in Chicago.
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.
Eric Drooker
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Doing art that has a happy ending, that doesn't seem really corny, is extremely difficult to pull off convincingly.
Eric Drooker
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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.
Eric Drooker
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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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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.
Eric Drooker
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I think for an artist there are so many things to make pictures of now, that everyone else may be suffering, but at least artists will just be stimulated by it all.
Eric Drooker
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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.
Eric Drooker