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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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Eric Drooker
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Comics Artist
Painter
New York City
New York
Lasts
Allowed
Last
Police
Art
Street
Way
Conversation
Always
Streets
Freaking
Involved
Poster
Wasn
Posters
Word
Yelling

More quotes by 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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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
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Infiltrating the mainstream was a natural extension of my street art. I've always tried to communicate ideas to the public as directly as possible.
Eric Drooker
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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.
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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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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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.
Eric Drooker
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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.
Eric Drooker
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Art is one of the few ways we have of dealing with things that frighten or anger us.
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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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 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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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 posters allowed you to have the last word. If you put them up in your neighborhood, you were speaking to your neighbor.
Eric Drooker
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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%.
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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Americans didn't really have any experience with something as basic as community.
Eric Drooker
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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.
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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Whether it's a street poster on a brick wall, a magazine cover on a newsstand, or animation on a movie screen - art is an effective means of communicating with large numbers of people.
Eric Drooker