After spending even a short amount of time with Molly Crabapple I get the feeling that she is from another time period. Her style, poise and wicked sense of humor seem more appropriate for a European courtesan than a present day artist living in New York City. Her illustration work possesses a sharp and worldly intelligence which should come as no surprise considering Crabapple has traveled Europe, Africa and had landed herself in a Turkish jail all before the age of 21.
Upon graduating High School early, Molly began traveling the world. "I had an epic plan of going to Europe which was based on nothing but reading The Diary of Anais Nin." She had originally planned on being in Europe for only three months but stayed much longer. "I started doing all sorts of things to horrify my dear mother," she says.
While in Paris and searching for new digs, Molly paid a visit to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. "It was inhabited by professional paupers," she says, "I had heard of the place but I didn't know they let people live there." She spoke to the shop owner with the notion of impressing him with her illustrations. The curious man, claiming to be the bastard son of Walt Whitman, said to her "Honey, there is no miracle greater than being a young girl in Paris in the spring...be my little daughter!" The other girls living in the bookstore convinced Molly that the owner wasn't a pervert so she moved in.
Molly showed her illustrations to a Parisian boyfriend who bluntly told her the work was "crap" and bought her a beautiful notebook, saying "fill it with something good." Not wanting to ruin the book, Molly made a conscious effort to improve her pen and ink drawings. Molly's lavish pen and ink technique comes from hours spent copying Alice in Wonderland and A Tart's Progess. At the time Molly was annoyed by the directness of the comment but she later found it to be motivational. "If I didn't have someone criticizing me like that I never would have gotten so much better."
Molly then traveled to the Middle East simply because "chicks don't so that." "I made a trip to Eastern Turkey. I studied Turkish on my own so I knew just enough of the language to get myself into trouble," she says. Molly decided that Kurdistan would be an excellent place for a young woman traveling alone to be a trouble maker. "I'd say things to the Kurds like, "Say, that Turkish government ...tell me what you think of that!" Amazingly Molly wasn't killed though she did catch the eye of a few bored and lonely military police who took her into custody. "There were a lot of young guys who were drafted into the army and are stuck in the middle of nowhere with guns and nothing to do and no one will talk to them. They took me to their station and they had me there with the machine guns and the dogs and they're giving me tea and asking me 'so in America, do you wear the mini skirt, no?' At that point I was convinced I was going to die, (laughs)." I wish I had some bold tale of escape but I really just burst into tears." They took me back to my hotel where the hotel owner laughed at me. Ever since my travels there, I've become more tolerant of New York street harassment," says Crabapple.
Molly's intelligence and smart-ass sense of humor find their way into the illustrated world she creates in which playful and deviant characters hold court. "My subject matter comes from when I am sitting with my friends having coffee and bullshitting. I have a nasty sense of humor I suppose because I start mocking people and it finds its way to my illustrations," say Crabapple. Molly did a series of illustrations based on "all the little demons that personify the vices and idiocies that afflict intellectuals. There is Prudence, she's the one who bores people at parties and says things like 'Truly, American foreign policy is going downhill; I wonder if we will continue to endanger the world like this.'"
Molly is currently working on a series of portraits of burlesque dancers and sideshow people. Aside from her illustration work, Molly also performs as a burlesque dancer. "I got into burlesque dancing because I wanted to sketch girls backstage," she says. With her partner, Johnny Panama, the two perform a routine to Doris Day's 'Tea for Two' which culminates with Molly raping her partner on stage. Crabapple says of her act, "It's very crowd pleasing."
Molly's work has been published in Screw Magazine and New York Press.
On The Web | www.mollycrabapple.com
