On Coney Island, I watched from the wings as Remy Vicious fucked herself with unicorn lollipops. She lay on her back, spread her legs into a horizontal split, and shoved the eight inches of candy in and out, in time with Marilyn Manson. Nasty Canasta stripped elegantly to the sound of car alarms. Peaches and Cream strutted back and forth in angel wings, periodically slapping her own round ass. We finished the show with a wine bath, climbing all over one another in the claw-foot tub, red with rotgut. Then we washed off in the Atlantic Ocean. Dino’s Wonder Wheel outshone the moon.
at Vice (vice.com)
At Galapagos, I gave a guy at the bar six dollar bills to throw at me, trying to encourage the habit in others. No one followed his lead. But the guy was a publicist, and he liked my initiative. Later he repped my first real art show, at a comics shop.
I learned to eat fire from a friend who’d toured with a sideshow. It’s an easy trick, not to be confused with fire breathing, which is far more difficult. Fire needs oxygen. When you put the torch into your mouth, you gently close your lips, cutting off the oxygen. If it burns your mouth, it’s no worse than drinking a too-hot cup of coffee.
The day after I first ate fire, my breath tasted like gasoline.
I walked on glass at the Pyramid Club. As with many sideshow stunts, it’s not so much a trick as a willingness to hurt oneself for attention. Before the act, my fellow performers and I rolled the glass in a pillowcase, to blunt the edges. It cut my feet anyway. We kept the glass in a leopard-print sheet to hide the blood.
John and I created acts to perform together. In one, he played Andy Warhol, and I was his aspiring protégée. “I just want to be loved by you,” Marilyn cooed behind us onstage. Who didn’t want to be loved by an art star? Burlesque works in caricature, so I wore a beret with my long black dress, an oversized portfolio flopping in my hands. I presented the portfolio to John. He scowled at one of my drawings, then tore it in two. He took out another drawing, then another, tearing each to pieces in contempt. I stripped. He showered me with bills. When the act ended, he slapped a price tag on my forehead.
One of my fire-eating gigs was on New Year’s Eve at an illegal warehouse party. Someone had called the cops on every other illegal warehouse party that night, so this one was packed. Thousands of bodies danced, high in the crimson light. I drank hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps, leaning on Fred’s arm as he elbowed us through the crowd to the dressing room. Before me, a sideshow girl let the audience staple money to her: her arms, her forehead, her breasts. A woman on stilts stood next to a giant wheel that read “Kiss, or Pain.” For five dollars, guests could spin the wheel. If it landed on “Pain,” she tased them. Guys lined up anyway.
At six A.M., the promoter counted out his profit in the dressing room. Tens of thousands of dollars lined up in stacks on the concrete floor.
I got two hundred and fifty.
I was at the bottom of the New York performance hierarchy, but I was still attractive enough to get steady work. I danced several nights a week, either solo at the weekly burlesque nights held at many dive bars, or as a go-go dancer in the background of a party. Only occasionally did I perform on a proper stage. While burlesque padded out the money I made modeling and from my illustration work, it was less a job and more a love. Whether I called myself an artist or model or dancer felt irrelevant. Dancing was an entrée into the world I wanted to capture.
Experiences blurred together. Wake up, draw all morning while speaking to my mother, pose in the afternoon on some guy’s fire escape, then throw my G-string into a shopping bag and take the train to the Lower East Side, to squirm through a song at the Starshine Burlesque show. Each gig fed the others.
And yet, for all the hours I spent onstage, performance was never natural to me. Performers need to be present in order to dance. For three minutes, they need to embody rage, passion, or grace—to be in the moment, not in their head. But my head was where I lived, and this suited me as an artist. Lining up my nibs, sketching in sloppy outlines with a mechanical pencil, then flicking the pen over and over on the page for fourteen hours until the contents of my skull had spilled out: that was where my talent lay.
By twenty-two, I was disillusioned with modeling and exhausted from the late nights at burlesque clubs. I managed to claw out illustration work, but what I produced only made my failings more obvious—especially compared with Fred’s virtuosity. I never drew a job I didn’t want to destroy.
Posing one night at the Society of Illustrators, I grew frustrated that my name wasn’t even on the flyer advertising the event. Many artists there told me I was their favorite person to draw, but on the flyer I was merely an anonymous “female model”—a gender and a body, interchangeable with any other. That interchangeability gnawed away at me whenever I posed. Long ago, models like Kiki de Montparnasse had been queens of their art scenes. But my model friends and I might as well have been flanks of beef. As I posed with glazed eyes and aching feet, I started imagining how things might be different.
I first thought up the idea for Dr. Sketchy’s on a train to DC with Fred. The concept was simple: a live-drawing workshop where models would be muses. I’d hire my friends from the underground performance world and pay them sixty dollars plus tips to pose for a roomful of artists. The models would wear the costumes in which they already performed, they’d pose in a way that expressed their character, and they’d be encouraged to talk back. John and I came up with the name on my living room floor.
Instead of a teacher, each Dr. Sketchy’s class was run by an emcee, just like a burlesque show. At first, A. V. Phibes, the illustrator with whom I founded the class, hosted. Then John and I took over the hosting, and eventually John did it alone. The emcees encouraged anarchy more than art, handing out shots in exchange for increasingly obscene drawings. Drawing on the lessons I’d learned from SuicideGirls, I churned out flyers for our first class, and promoted it using ideas I’d gathered from burlesque, modeling, art, comics, and underground nightlife. Even before it started, Dr. Sketchy’s had grown into a glittering pastiche.
We threw our first Dr. Sketchy’s in December 2005, at the Lucky Cat, a Williamsburg dive bar run by a friend. We filled the room with twenty acquaintances we’d begged to come, and my ever-supportive mother, who came to everything I did. Dottie Lux posed as a topless clown. We played music and talked and drew, passing a tip jar during breaks. The artists loved it. “It’s so different from other drawing classes,” one girl told me. As she spoke, I realized I didn’t know her. She was the first stranger who’d ever come to something I’d produced.
Afterward, John and I were giddy. We had thrown a party and people actually came. We took our forty-dollar profit and drank it at the bar.
Our second Dr. Sketchy’s was better attended than the first, and by the third class, a hundred artists showed up. We seated them on the arms of chairs, even on the stage itself. We turned no one away. I stared out at them from the wings, swooning with glee.
Before too long, A. V. left to tend to her own art business. From then on, John and I ran Dr. Sketchy’s together. I took care of the business end: booking models, sending out press releases, and leaving stacks of flyers at every hipster café in Williamsburg. It was mostly drudgery, but it kept the class running. John made mixtapes, built palatial stage sets out of balloons and tinfoil, and hosted with style.
John and I worked with the models to create a theme for each new Dr. Sketchy’s class, usually based around the models’ interests. We did classes based on the Beijing Opera, summer-camp slasher films, Marie Antoinette, and Star Trek’s Uhura.
We threw a Dr. Sketchy’s that was a mashup of a dozen different dystopian futures: Brave New World, 1984, V for Vendetta. John plastered the walls with dozens of posters he designed, one reading “Dr. Sketchy’s Is Watching You.” Miss Pandora posed as a Soviet commissar. Lithe, redheaded Gal Friday costumed herself as Queen Elizabeth I, with a bald cap to mimic the queen’s tweezed-back forehead. I hired a handsome waiter to pose with h
er, as Shakespeare, and John pulled on a black robe and a ruff made of doilies to preside over the whole mess as Oliver Cromwell.
Dr. Sketchy’s gave me the chance to hire burlesque dancers I’d long admired. Dirty Martini blew a kiss to Dr. Sketchy’s artists while covered in white roses. In another class, the seaweed-haired alt model Aprella encased herself in only transparent latex. Akynos, a professional dancer who had just started in burlesque, looked like a 1960s pinup illustration—a massive afro atop her tiny, curvaceous body. Sometimes she modeled as a pan-African goddess, dripping with feathers and gold. Perle Noire painted her face white and posed like a geisha, while Stormy Leather painted her body blue and posed like X-Men’s Mystique.
John took more and more of a directorial role, scripting performances, building elaborate sets, even learning theatrical lighting techniques. Conspiring with a staffer, we snuck into a prestigious science lab to shoot Reefer Madness–style comedy shorts, with Dr. Sketchy as a mad scientist and me in a beaded bikini, disappearing in a puff of smoke.
After Dr. Sketchy’s first few classes, Syd, a fan of Jen Dziura’s comedy, started helping out. Others followed. Over the next year, a crew of helpers gathered around us: videographers, artists, set designers, programmers, and photographers—the “art monkeys” who made so much of what we did possible. Eventually, three punk kids started coming to every class: two guys and a girl, covered in tattoos, who mostly kept to themselves—at least until John fired vodka from a water gun into the guys’ mouths. That broke the ice.
The girl had a voice so soft it was nearly inaudible, and purple hair, half shaved, framing her much-pierced face. Her name was Melissa Dowell, and she was an artist in her own right. She started working with me soon thereafter, building Dr. Sketchy’s sets with the two guys, Tim and Foley. Soon she’d become my right-hand woman, the enabler of all my art.
One day, during a class with Lady J, an old friend from my Internet modeling days, thunder crashed overhead. The sky broke open. All of us—John, Syd, Lady J, the art monkeys, and I—ran outside, stripped off our shirts, and danced in the hot summer rain.
To spread the word about Dr. Sketchy’s, I turned to the social blogging network LiveJournal and the witty, emotional subculture in which my fellow grown-up goth girls and I had bonded. I started spamming LJ illustrators’ groups, many of which had international readerships.
At first there was little interest. But after a few months of posting about Sketchy’s, one man in rural Denmark commented, “I wish I lived in New York. Nothing happens where I am.”
This got me thinking. Why couldn’t Dr. Sketchy’s happen in Denmark? Or anywhere else, wherever there were artists and models? Why should anyone have to feel jealous about the scenes in other places, when they could create glittering trouble where they lived?
In a defiant mood, I wrote up a short list of rules for anyone who wanted to start a Dr. Sketchy’s chapter in his or her city:
•Treat your models well. Ravishing, interesting models are the foundations upon which a good life-drawing class is built. Show them respect. Pay them a good wage. Encourage artists to tip. Bring pillows and space heaters. Remember, models are stars. If you treat your models badly, the ghost of Kiki de Montparnasse will come back to life and beat you to death with a violin.
•Don’t hit on models, creep out artists, or act like a jerk.
•Make a webpage, even a MySpace page. Exchange links with me. The Internet is our generation’s Gutenberg. Without a website, you don’t exist.
•Email me first. I am a megalomaniac who enjoys seeing her ideas reach fruition, and I want to keep an eye on you.
I followed this with some basic advice on lighting, choosing a venue, and finding models. Then I posted the whole thing on the LiveJournal illustrators’ community.
Before long, an apprentice tattoo artist in Melbourne emailed me to ask if she could run a Dr. Sketchy’s at a local bar. Then I heard from an art director in Detroit.
Then a fourth person asked me. A fifth. A sixth. A zine wrote about Dr. Sketchy’s. Two art students in Toronto read the article, started a branch, and hired a drag queen from Hamburg. She started the first branch in Germany. A theatrical producer visited it while on vacation. She started a branch in Sydney.
By the fall of 2006, there were twenty Dr. Sketchy’s branches around the world. They were “branches” in only the loosest sense. Anyone could try. I didn’t charge anyone money to host a Dr. Sketchy’s, nor did I even interview potential hosts at first. Many people who requested Dr. Sketchy’s branches gave up before even hosting their first class. Other branches, like the one in Melbourne, are still running nine years later.
Dr. Sketchy’s spread with the burlesque scene. As burlesque festivals bloomed from South Africa to Zagreb, Sketchy’s branches followed. People loved it because it provided a nonintimidating way for those who had once drawn to start again, and it introduced two communities, artists and performers, who had long been artificially separated. Its ethos was populist; it made people want to draw, and it dared some to live more bravely.
At their best, the Dr. Sketchy’s chapters around the world awed me. In Paris, an American costume designer named Sorrel Smith produced elaborate tableaux vivants for artists to draw. On Bastille Day she styled zombie aristocrats, their throats slashed by sansculottes. Dr. Sketchy’s in New Zealand ran classes for female prisoners. After having acrobatic pole dancers pose for artists, Dr. Sketchy’s Kansas City was raided by the vice cops. The branch came back only stronger.
As Dr. Sketchy’s spread, media attention grew. “Expect to find clowns, glitter, pasties, swords, hula hoops, and more to inspire your next masterpiece,” the Village Voice wrote. “As many varieties of depraved humanity as three hours can hold,” said the Phoenix New Times.
Rip-off events came along with this attention. Every time I saw one, I sulked hatefully. Mine, I fumed, ignoring the fact that Dr. Sketchy’s was the effort of many people and that being ripped off meant we’d changed the way things were done.
Over time, Dr. Sketchy’s spread to Shanghai and Chile, Singapore, Johannesburg, and Peru. Eventually we had classes in one hundred and forty cities. After five years, I passed Dr. Sketchy’s on to Melissa Dowell. And as I write this, it’s spreading still.
The same December that I started Dr. Sketchy’s, Fred moved into a loft in Bushwick. In all but name, I moved in with him. We slept on a foldout couch. His cat woke us up each morning by clawing its way across our backs.
When I wasn’t at Dr. Sketchy’s, I hung out at Fred’s place and drew. I did T-shirt designs and a children’s book about a boy who had collected all the world’s raindrops. I drew logos for roller derby leagues, burlesque posters, and pornographic comics for Playgirl. I drew anything that got me paid. I grew better in slow increments, without ever feeling that I’d become good.
I wanted my drawings to be universes. I wanted to pack each page so full of life that it resembled a Bosch fantasia or a Persian miniature or Where’s Waldo. I wanted each piece to be one you could stare at for hours and be rewarded. I never made detailed plans for my art, but started with doodles on the backs of envelopes—legible only to me. Then I rolled out my paper and began making shapes with a mechanical pencil. I could feel it, when they were right. I drew lines on top of lines. They looked like scribbles, but behind them I could see a world emerge.
Then I took out my crow quills. I had two nibs. One was flexible metal, to create a variable line, the other a frail tube that made marks as thin as eyelashes. I started drawing a girl. No one looking at the page would have guessed her existence from the pencil, but I did. As I drew her face, it felt like peeling dried glue off your hand to reveal the skin beneath.
As the girl emerged, she told me what would surround her.
This wasn’t donkeywork. It was ecstasy.
Everything had changed in my art. After years of helplessly watching my ink lines drag, I found that the pen had become an extension of my hand. Drawing was as addictive as dr
ugs, as natural as breath. I could make any picture I wanted. This freedom dizzied me, and I drew compulsively, until not one more creature could fit on the page. I stared. The curls, the girls, the animals, the flowers. My eyes couldn’t focus. The lines looked like lace.
If I needed to color the drawing, I poured some gouache onto a piece of foam, filled a jar with water, and sparingly dabbed my brush into the paint. I was scared of paint. I loved my lines too much and didn’t want anything to overwhelm them. Slowly I filled in the piece, as if it were a coloring book, the hues raw from the tube. When I was done, I ran bright red along some of the edges to make them pop. I shaded in shadows with complementary colors so they would recede. Then I propped up the piece against a wall. No matter what else I had to do, my eyes would keep involuntarily returning. For the next day, that piece was my world.
In 2006, after I’d been running Dr. Sketchy’s for six months, an independent press named Sepulculture Books messaged me through MySpace and offered to publish a Dr. Sketchy’s book. I was so excited at the prospect of publishing my art that I didn’t care that Sepulculture did not strictly exist, except in the mind of its creator.
Scott, Sepulculture’s CEO, was an underling at a major publisher. But when we met, he seemed confident that he could revolutionize the book industry with his own side project. Who wouldn’t want to be in on that? I signed up, bringing John with me.
John and I made Dr. Sketchy’s Official Rainy Day Colouring Book together. It was a fragmentary thing, filled with drinking games and half-remembered art history gossip. Like us, it was maximalist, snotty, and occasionally clever, but it was the first cohesive piece of work either of us had ever done.
Scott told me he wouldn’t sell the book through bookstores, or even through the major online retailers—these were old-world venues, and he intended to swashbuckle into the future. It didn’t even occur to me to ask him how he intended to sell the book until perilously close to the release date.
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