Art Brute is a recurring feature that asks artists of every calibre, every style, about their recent work.

A few days back, I posted an oddly hypnotizing video for Julian Lynch jam, "Seed." Directed by amateur filmmaker Amy Ruhl, and off of Lynch's debut LP, Orange You Glad (Olde English Spelling Bee), the video scored world-eroding fuzz to endless collages of hazy, 16mm geography. I inhaled it. Through an email conversation I learnt how Ruhl shackled "Seed" together and why the overhead projector is her favourite toy.

What kind of education prepares someone for the director's chair?
I haven't had much formal training. I spent about 2 and a half semesters in film school before dropping out and getting a degree in literature. I would say the time I spent [working] at the Library for the Performing Arts was probably the most significant training I've undergone. It's an antiquarian's paradise, all of the archival materials: marble-covered scrapbooks, film stills, stage dioramas, hand-tinted photographs, the act of preservation itself... Just having my eyes open [in] the three years spent working there gave me more inspiration for developing a personal aesthetic than, I believe, any film school could ever deliver.

Okay. Who contacted whom?
I approached Julian about doing a video the first time I heard his music.  I honestly never had that much interest in making music videos, but his songs reminded me so much of all the 60's psychadelia I'd been listening to for awhile—so blissed-out at times, melancholy at others—that I wanted to see if I could come up with images to match that tone.  I sent him some video excerpts of other work I had done and he was really complimentary and open to the idea.  From there I started corresponding with Todd Ledford (of Olde English Spelling Bee - SD); Julian and Todd let me have the freedom to come up with whatever I wanted. After I gave them a first draft they got involved in the revision process, but generally I was left to my own devices.

Parts seem to spiral down to infinity, others I'm just discovering. What was the process like?
The process began with a long, sometimes frustrating image search on various digital archives, looking for photographs that lend themselves to being cut up; interesting elements in the foreground that will stay, but also clear contrasts in shade that give me a path to follow while I'm cutting into it. I let the image itself tell me where things need to happen. With the stereoscopes, I always replaced the skyline with papers or covers of antique scrapbooks that I then animated to morph and bend based on color difference. I try to look for things within photographs that would have motion, had they been filmed instead, and then find or create moving footage to go in its place. I suppose the process is really about choosing what to preserve from the original that will maintain stillness, and then what I can dispose of to make the overall collage more cinematic.  I embellish from there, adding elements of texture or color I wish existed already in the image I started with.

Was it daunting to suddenly find yourself with this much responsibility?
Hmmm, well I was lucky in that I was given the chance to pick the song, and obviously a music video is only going to be as good as the music it accompanies. Julian's music has a cinematic quality to it already. The tempo, [that] hypnotic quality—the repetitions allow you to really conjure and develop visuals in your head that aren't fleeting. I chose "Seed" because the lyrics are sparse, and I didn't want to end up literalizing every word that was sung. That technique is pretty cheesy to me unless it's purposely overdone and laced with irony.  Instead, I approached it by latching onto the imagery he creates at the beginning of "Seed," but then departing from it when the song bends into just pure instrumentation.  I tried to pay my dues to what I felt the song 'looks' like, but then let myself indulge in a style that felt authentic and familiar to me. 

This feels analog in a way most videos aren't. What tools did you use?
I use an overhead projector a lot, it's sort of my favorite toy right now—to create shadows, oil light projections, or just to place transparent objects on and then photograph or film the projection with a digital still camera. I photograph and scan a lot of materials I find or make, sometimes painting them first or manipulating them in some way. What's usually most important is that I capture the texture. I find 16mm films—usually educational or industrial films—that have been digitized to cut into and shape in After Effects, where I do all the final collaging. 

How long did it take then?
Somehow, I finished the first draft in a week, working almost 12 hours a day on it. Kind of crazy, I guess.   I think I work much more aggressively when I have someone to answer to, rather than when it's just my own personal endeavors.  After I got asked to make some changes, I scrapped all of the original stereoscope collages except for one and made new ones, which took another week.  More specifically, the collages can take around two days to produce 30-40 seconds [of content] when I'm not in total high-speed mode.

 
Looking back, did you think it'd be this much work?
I definitely found "Seed" more challenging than my other projects. I realized when making this music video that it is much, much easier for me to pick images and know where I'm going with them when it's guided by narrative. I suppose I could have tried to create some sort of story for "Seed," but for me personally, I just feel like there's not enough time within the duration of the song to really develop anything that would not reek of lameness. I got a minute into the song, already sort of exhausted, and realized there was still a monstrous (but lovely), three and a half minute long jam session left to work with. I felt as if I was sort of just creating pure aesthetic, which was difficult for me because, well, I'm pretentious. Everything else I've worked on has taken feminist-themed narratives, deriving a style and form from there. With the music video, I could go anywhere, which is a scary feeling for me.

What did Julian say about the finished product?
It seems like he really dug the final version. All of our correspondence was via email, so it's kind of hard to tell. But given he used some exclamation points and all caps in his response, he seemed pretty excited.

Art Brute is a recurring feature that asks artists of every calibre, every style, about their recent work.

Award-winning animator Nick Cross (Spumco, Nickelodeon, New Line Entertainment) just released 'Yellow Cake,' a gorgeously rendered parable on escalation and terror and fluffy animals. After stumbling onto the short and being completely charmed by its conceit, I was compelled to contact the Ottawa native (through Vimeo, of all places) and press him on its creation.


You began this project back in 2006. How much work went into animating Yellow Cake?
Animation is by its very nature, a lot of work.  I work in Flash in order to speed up my production but it is still very time-consuming.  About halfway through the production, I invested in a Cintiq tablet which enabled me to draw and animate directly in Flash.  That sped me up a lot. I also painted all of the backgrounds in Photoshop as opposed to painting them traditionally. But still, to give you a bit of an idea, there was an average of 8-12 drawings for every second of animation, and the film was just over 8 minutes in length (SD: that's over 4800 drawings).  Also, there were over 150 individual scenes in the film each requiring its own background.  Each background took anywhere from 1-6 hours to paint.  And that doesn't take into consideration the writing, editing, sound design etc.   It's a lot of labour, but it's a labour of love.

How did the challenges of Yellow Cake differ from your previous short, The Waif of Persephone?
I don't really make enough from the production of these short films to be able to do them full-time, so the main challenges were in finding the time to work on it in between my commercial jobs.  So, even though the film has technically been in production for almost three years, a large chunk of that time I didn't work on it at all.  I was so busy with paying work that I didn't get a chance to work on it at all in 2008.  This was basically the same problem I had with the production The Waif of Persephone.

Still from Yellow Cake, 2009

What compelled you to use adorable characters to explore Bush-era fears?
I thought of it sort of like a fable, using cute animals to tell a story more universality.  It's like adding some sugar to make the medicine taste better, something like that anyway.  The idea for the film came to me in 2003, around the time of the build-up to the war in Iraq.  There was a lot of talk about 'yellow cake' uranium being sold in ominous tones, but I always thought of yellow cake as being a delicious dessert treat.  I thought that the contrast was really funny and that got my creative juices flowing.  I always enjoy the idea of blending cute things with something horrible; it's just such an extreme contrast that I can't resist going back to that well over-and-over again.

Without spoiling too much, why did you choose to end the short the way it did?
It was an attempt to put a final twist of reality, albeit in a slightly surreal way.  A lot of the choices I make, story-wise are pretty much instinctual.  I don't follow any sort of formula or framework with my story process. It just felt like the right way to end it - combining a joke with a bit of social commentary.  I wasn't directly intending it to be an indictment of the audience, but it definitely can serve that purpose.  

Now that this mammoth project's done, how do you plan on relaxing?
Ha, doing this stuff is how I relax.  My next film is going to be even bigger I think... I've already started on it. There's no rest for the wicked.

Still from Yellow Cake, 2009

Hip deep in a 1950s aesthetic drunk on smooth contours and polished palettes is the art of Brian Clarke, an illustrator whose lines informed much of the late '90s to the early Naughts. With a body of work that includes images for the Washington Post and Diesel Clothing, indoctrinating countless Junior High pop-punks with his iconic album art for Fat Wreck's long-runnning parody, Fat Music for Fat People ('sup grade 9?), and finishing a graphic novel written by director/screenwriter Adam Rifkin (Detroit Rock City), you'd be forgiven for thinking the 46 year-old Bay Area illustrator would choose to rest on his laurels.

Not a chance. Under the psuedonum of Les Toil, Clarke has devoted all his free time to his Toil Girls, an internationally renowned project focused exclusively on redefining average women—from overweight housewives to plus-size adult stars—into commanding plump pin-ups that echo the bawdy work of Vargas, Petty, and Coop.

Toil took a break from his piling commissions, discussing via email just why he prefers his art XL.

What do you find so appealing about the plump female form?
The full robustness of a larger woman. When a woman has extra pounds on her, where does she begin showing that extra weight? In her thighs, her breasts, her hips, her waist, her buttocks. What are the body parts that are distinctly female? Her breasts, thighs, hips, and buttocks. I guess that’s why I’ve always been amazed to see so many so-called heterosexual men go ga-ga over rail-thin women. Those feminine body parts are the first things to disappear when a woman shrinks herself to super-model proportions. I want a shapely goddess, not a school boy.

What sort of training prepared you for this?
I guess I began to aesthetically educate myself by tracing the covers of comic books. I started off tracing over cartoony-type comic book covers like Bugs Bunny and Dennis the Menace. And then I “graduated” to more realistic material such as super-heroes. I particularly loved Marvel Comics and the artists that drew Captain America, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man.

I took as many art classes as I was allowed to take in high school, and from there I ended up in art school where I guess the formal training began. I attended the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland and graduated from the San Francisco Academy of Art as an Commercial Illustration major.

What inspired you to start taking commissions, to create the Toil Girls project?
Way back in the mid to late 1990s, I wanted to impress this particular lovely plus-size model I came upon online with my art skills. I did her portrait in a classic pin-up style and she apparently enjoyed it so much she wanted to show her online friends, many of which were also big girls. A few of them offered to pay me to do their portrait and I ended up creating as many portraits as I could between my commercial art assignments (at the time I was paying my bills by taking on such commercial art assignments as illustrating magazine articles, book covers, box art for action figures, production art for movies, tons of CD covers for bands, concert posters, etc.).

I also began doing plus-size pin-up art for a popular sexy website at that time (circa 1997) called Billy Bob’s Cyber Shack. It wasn’t an x-rated site as much as it was a place where attractive big women could feel like pin-up queens just like their thin counterparts and display photos of themselves in saucy clothes. Billy Bob started a 'Big Beautiful Babe of The Month' feature on his site and the lovely lady chosen for that month would have her portrait drawn by me. I suppose that site was where my national exposure began. That exposure was definitely on a small select fringe level catering to us guys that go crazy over plus-size women, but I soon discovered that that crowd held impressive numbers not only nation wide but across the world. By the time Billy Bob’s site came to a gradual demise, I was getting quite a few more email inquiries from women interested in having their portraits done in that classic cheesecake pin-up style.

After I created my first website/pin-up gallery, there seemed to be an interest of sorts in being in that gallery. The term 'Toil Girl' was something I naturally had to steal from pin-up master George Petty and his Petty Girls as well as from Alberto Vargas and his Vargas Girls. Nothing original about the term Toil Girl but it turned into a title that held a measure of status among some BBW. I’d like to think the attitude of becoming a Toil Girl is as fun as my approach to creating their portraits. I take tremendous pleasure in collaborating with the client during the creative process, as the concept of each portrait typically comes from the client herself. If they don’t have a clue of where to begin, I’ll have them send me a quick little write-up about their likes and interests and that usually proves to be the impetus I can draw from. The part of the process I take seriously is my ability to render their likeness as true and as beautifully as I can, and to convey their spirit as best as I can based upon my exchange with them and the personal information they’ve given. I realized this was something I wouldn’t mind doing for a long time. 

Your pin-ups are stylistically different from the rest of your illustration work. How do you approach a Toil Girl?
I think I approach my Toil Assignments the same as my other art jobs. I strive for perfection. As corny as it may sound, I draw upon the spirit and dilligence of the pin-up masters the same way I try to channel the enthusiasm of all the other past artists I worship. Something that I know many artists do is, they’ll monitor how their art is progressing and they’ll ask themselves, is this painting as good as a Maxfield Parrish? Would Jack Kirby be satisfied with how this composition is developing? I do the same thing with pretty much anything I commit to paper.

But you also mentioned style. I used to render my art with traditional oil paint like many commercial artists of the past but that proved to be too expensive and way too time-consuming during this turbulent economy, so pen and ink and digital coloring is mainly how I do my art. If time allows, I’ll do an assignment with paint and canvas. But yes, my style is definitely different now than it was, say, ten years ago, mainly due to the medium I’m working with now.

There's a 50s aesthetic that works wonderfully with both your pin-ups and your more serious illustration. How did you develop this style?
By mimicking the work of the great artists of the golden era of illustration. Of course, in my feeble attempt to achieve what they’ve achieved, what comes forth is my own distinct style, and I guess that’s not ultra modern.

But larger women are almost exclusively rendered as anachronisms. What is it about past time periods that work so well to define them?
Hmmmm....I don’t really know. Personally, I always think big girls are a great subject matter for goddess art due to their mammoth proportions and larger-than-life stature. But there’s no denying they just fit well in the Bettie Page and Rockabilly genre of art and photography.

Are there any particular women you've wanted to render?
That’s a tough one to answer because if you’re referring to well-known women, then I’d have to say no. There’s just not that many plus-size celebs that don’t hate their bodies, and the full-figured ones that don’t hate their bodies know it’s practically career suicide to stand up against a fat-hating society and entertainment industry. And I’d be afraid to approach most fat celebrities because by the time I would've created their portrait they might be sporting their latest NutraSlim body and want nothing to do with a full-figured image of themselves.

Everyone always tells me I need to get in touch with comedienne Mo'Nique about doing her portrait. I’ve admired most of the work she’s done in the entertainment field. There’s that new movie, Precious (2009), where Mo'Nique plays the mother of a large teen who has a destroyed sense of self-worth. From what I’ve seen, its pretty powerful and, interestingly enough, Mo'Nique’s character looks as if she’s the one mainly responsible for the erosion of her daughter’s character. It seems like the kind of role that was either difficult for Mo'Nique to play, or really easy. As an icon of large pride, I’m sure she’s endured quite a bit or rough terrain throughout her life. I’m assuming she’ll soon be recognized as a dramatic acting force to be reckoned with. Let’s just hope she won’t be thirty pounds lighter when she goes onstage to receive her Oscar.

Side projects tend towards catharsis. Is there a specific enjoyment you derive from the Toil Girls?
Most artist wants to believe his or her art transcends from being just a pretty image on a canvas or from being just an attractively-shaped piece of clay. They want to believe their work has made a positive and definite difference to the world. Aside from the narcissistic urge to have my art seen by as many people as possible, I can’t help but to look at the legacy of such people as Martin Luther King, John Muir, and Ghandi that wanted to make the earth a better place for all, and attempt in even the smallest way to make the inhabitants of this planet smile or think in positive terms about those that they may have once ridiculed. And there’s also that strong interest to continue the tradition of a fantastic art form, but to do so in a more open-minded way that no longer restricts the subject matter to one particular size, shape, color or age. But in all honesty, I really, really, just like drawing big, sexy women.

You've collaborated with screenwriter/director Adam Rifkin on a variety of film and TV projects...
In all of his movies, Adam has to include the Blump’s lady. She’s like the Betty Crocker of Blump’s Foods, and often he’ll have me do a new ad or two for each movie. He asked me to design a Blump’s Burgers fast food restaurant for his movie Detroit Rock City (1999). With his TV projects, he’s had me create elaborate illustrations to help sell a project to certain major TV companies. I had great fun doing these cheesy horror movie posters that were used in the background on a children’s show Adam helped to create called Bone Chillers (1996) for ABC TV. Some of the mock movie posters were 'Zombo the Killer Clown,' 'Eyeballs The Robot Meets The Ghoul' (Eyeballs later became one of the four protagonists in our graphic novel Shmobots). Oh, and 'Mummies From Venus.'

How did you begin working with Adam Rifkin, especially on the booze downing Shmobots (Boom Studios)?
Adam had seen an illustration I did for the cover of a movie-appreciation magazine called Film Threat. It was back in 1986 during the ‘zine era when angry young men and women took on the big industries and satirized them in print.

I did this elaborate painting of singer Karen Carpenter feeding her dinner plate to her dog (she died of anorexia). It was a harsh bit of parody that I’m not necessarilly proud of, but it caught the young screenwriter Adam’s attention and he contacted me through the publisher, Chris Gore, about doing a bunch of crazy art for his movie The Dark Backward (1991). He had me create about sixty pieces of art for a fake food company in the future called Blump’s. I still to this day get emails from fans of The Dark Backward asking if I’m the Blump’s artist.

It’s an extremely twisted and great movie. Interestingly enough, there’s an orgy scene featuring two massive porn actresses weighing about 350 pounds each. There’s another movie Adam wrote and directed called Denial (1998) where he, himself, played an 'FA' or Fat Admirer, so I can’t help but  entertain the idea that there’s some part of Adam that may appreciated the female form at its fullest!

And hey, Rob Lowe, Wayne Newton, James Caan and Judd Nelson are the stars of The Dark Backward! Those actors will either never forget their participation in that film or they’re trying their best to forget their participation in it! But yes, I’ve been working with Adam in one capacity or another in many of his cinematic projects since then. So now it’s graphic novels. I guess it was inevitable he’d send a couple of his screenplays and ask me to turn them into illustrated books.

With so much keeping you busy, is there a project you'd kill to work on?
I would love to just paint again. Paint whatever I want and not have to worry about deadlines and how appetizing the product I’m hired to illustrate is. As much as I love creating Toil portraits, there’s still that great effort to make sure the woman in the art looks like the woman who hired me—or at least render her in a way that satisfies her. It’s fun work but often I dream of just getting out the old oil paints and painting whatever’s in my head at that time and answering to no one. No doubt we all have that dream, don’t we?

Will you ever retire the pen to focus on other projects—magazines, film—or is it larger ladies for life?
Hopefully for life! I enjoy this way too much. Even if people lose their taste for my big girl art or a more talented artist blows me out of the water I’ll definitely continue having a great time rendering the ample female figure. The “rush” I get from reading a testimonial from a Toil Girl client about how her portrait sincerely touched her and made a positive addition to her life is a feeling I’ll want to know for as long as I can.

Pot smoking robots or plush women?
Definitely the women. Robots are typically void of curves.