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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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Eric Drooker
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Comics Artist
Painter
New York City
New York
Speaking
Allowed
Street
Word
Last
Posters
Neighborhood
Neighbor

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