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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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Eric Drooker
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Comics Artist
Painter
New York City
New York
Dealing
Anger
Ways
Art
Way
Things
Frighten

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