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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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Eric Drooker
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Comics Artist
Painter
New York City
New York
Thinking
Inspired
Artwork
Early
Surrounded
Side
Reflect
Sides
Lower
Living
Twenties
Trying
Time
Tragedy
Think
East

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.
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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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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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Doing art that has a happy ending, that doesn't seem really corny, is extremely difficult to pull off convincingly.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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Americans didn't really have any experience with something as basic as community.
Eric Drooker
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The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are.
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