Episode: 25 Mike Giant

Mike Giant talks to us about Americana, graffitti, and running from the police, and advises us all to do drugs, meditate, and shoot guns.

Episode 24: Peter Shire

Peter Shire is a artist and designer whose public projects and furniture defined the look of the modern west coast. We visit Peter's funhouse studio to talk about being an artist and a businessman, cliche art interview questions, primary colors, how many assistants you can have before one is a disaster, the Bauhaus, deco, collaboration and giving to the customer any size they want.

Episode 23: Melissa Brown (apologies for the abnormal sound quality)

We talk to Melissa Brown about abstraction, beauty, chaos, Vegas, chance, printmaking vs painting, preserving moments in time, color choices and rear view mirrors.

Episode 22: James Jean

In our longest episode to date we talk to James Jean about assimilation, the paintings nobody buys, how Zak and James both painted Sasha Grey, death awareness, social media, legitimacy and competitiveness, illustration vs fine art and the crossover of the two, illustrating nothing, NGOs hiring you to make sex rabbits, comics, vintage illustrators, Kuniyoshi, and never doing the decisive moment, plus we ask James which of his art friends is crazier: Takashi Murakami or David Choe?

Episode 21: Jonathan Ehrenberg

Jon Ehrenberg creates otherworldly videos with a side of deadpan humor. We talk about  how that sensibility formed, how the work gets made, and how it relates to Jon's old day job in animation.

Episode 20: Robyn O'Neil

We visit Robyn's studio to talk about death, artists as represented in 1980s sitcoms, Romanticism, ugliness, making art in Hollywood, Howard Stern, being Werner Herzog's student, poetry, and everything else.

Episode 19: Rona Pondick

We talked to Rona Pondick about Egyptian art, having ideas and not having ideas, how people are just animals, how long it takes Rona to make a sculpture, death, process and scary teeth.

Episode 18: Jen Ray

Jen Ray puts together stylishly feminist drawings and performance pieces of amazon women using fantastic imagery drawn from rock's trippy and fantastic side. We talk about drawing, music, politics and the seedy side of childhood.

Episode 17: Al Jaffee

Al Jaffee has quite literaly been making cartoons longer than any artist in history. Unfortunately for everyone involved, he works at Mad Magazine.

 

 

 

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Episode 15: Drew Heitzler

Drew Heitzler is a conceptual artist and occasional curator who works in a variety of media. We talk about how you represent a train of thought, what's harder: making art or curating it?, working at CBGBs, being a dirtbag, the town of Goose Creek, Thomas Pynchon, Los Angeles as an art subject, philosophy, art fairs, owning a bar, and octopuses.

Episode 14: Valerie Hegarty

Valerie Hegarty's sculptures show nature reclaiming art. and history and often get mistaken for actual decay. One piece is attacked by a woodpecker, another harpooned, another one has an an idea she totally stole from her Dad. We talk about experiment, craft and being a consummate wiseass.

Nicholas Di Genova

Nicholas Di Genova (aka medium) is a painter, sculptor and street artist who makes art about mutant monsters. We talk about all that plus ecology, scale, his urban and rural phases, plus the worst dentist in history and more.

 

Episode 12: Ganzeer

Ganzeer paints,draws, designs, makes street art and comics and was chased out of Egypt for being a dissident. We talk about where his ideas come from, how he puts them together and what it was like to be in the middle of Cairo as the revolution was happening.

Episode 11 Jane Dickson

Jane Dickson makes psychologically loaded paintings about light, darkness, the city, and the people who live there. We talk about all that of course, plus Jane gives us some great details about the New York art scene in the 80s—where everyone from Kiki Smith to Basquiat seemed to know each other and hang out. 

 

Episode 10: Jon Pylypchuk

John Pylypchuk makes paintings and sculptures of pathetic little creatures in the grip of massive forces they'll never understand.We talk about John's collective, the Royal Art Lodge, being a rock dude, running your own gallery and more.

 

Episode 9: Trenton Doyle Hancock

Trenton Doyle Hancock's delirious paintings, prints, drawings, performances, toys, books and sculptures depict a complex mythological world that comments on the one we live in. We talk about a childhood of horror movies and Christianity, the process of painting, Philip Guston, German Expressionism, rhythm and poetry, the nature of storytelling in pictures, Havok and Wolverine: Meltdown and having your paintings made into a ballet.

Episode 8: Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple is a journalist/artist who just put out the memoir Drawing Blood. We talk about the book, and about New York, activism, art vs illustration, artistic lineage and how you go from being a naked art student to an international correspondent with work in the MOMA.

Episode 7: Ted Mineo

Ted Mineo makes objects that shouldn't exist--mixtures of lurid color and uncanny texture. We talk about a lot of things, including how they relate to fibrelglass New Orleans restaurant food ad sculptures.