Calling in Sick

Sean Star Wars has a reputation for making badass woodcuts and drinking tons of Mountain Dew. With no plans to slow down on the work or the dew, he’s plastering every square foot of the Ad Hoc Gallery (49 Bogart St, Brooklyn) with hundreds or thousands of his southern style woodcuts for Wall to Wall Woodcut Chaos, which opens Friday, April 27 from 6 to 10.

Check out more of Sean’s woodcuts at www.seanstarwars.com.

You’re constantly referred to as an outlaw printmaker, and it seems appropriate. How does this title differ from a regular printmaker?

There is a core group of printmakers that coexist in the real art world as well as the virtual reality of academia. They are well known within that artificial world and largely looked upon with disgust, or disdain. The problem is that they make prints that people want to look at. Big prints of ugly faces with bug eyes buck teeth and drooling mouths for example, prints with impolite content like shit eating kids, cannibal pigs, war victim/soldiers, pirates, wolves, child molesting clowns. That group includes Tom Huck, Dennis Mcnett, Bill Fick, and a handful of others including myself. We make prints that are the archenemy of the kind of bullshit stuff that universities have been teaching kids to make for the last 25 years. No science diagrams, no cancer cell studies, no quiet whispering prints dressed up in frilly gowns. We make holes in teeth, as they say.

Peter Panic

And then also I seem to catch a lot of flak in academic circles for the content of my work and the way I sometimes handle stereotypical imagery I find in old advertisements. I always felt that being an outlaw means never having to say you’re sorry. Hell I was fired last year from my job teaching art to poor black kids in the country projects of Mississippi. The kids loved me. But when they found out about my website they started looking at it in other classes and the administration didn’t dig it one bit. They didn’t like pictures of pigs fantasizing about having sex with hot dogs for instance. Remember, I never showed the kids those prints. They went to my website and saw them and showed other kids. In the tiny town I live in, a town where kids’ first birthdays make the front page of the newspaper, there was no way I was gonna survive the scandal they were cooking up so they canned me. Pretty outlaw I guess.

The Candyland Gang

Old advertisements play a big part in your work. What is it about these old images that connects with the ideas behind your woodcuts?

I look at a lot of old magazines from the 30’s 40’s and fifties. And of course I go back to my childhood too — old comics memories of ads from the mid seventies. I love the hand painted illustrations in the old magazines. So little straight photography. which is nice. I like to use those pre made pictures to help fabricate a story that i am always reshaping and retelling. The old imagery is also about the only thing I have in terms of a lasting heritage . I use them to inform myself what life was like fifty years ago for people not that different from me. And lastly I have a love hate relationship with the invasive quality of brand conscious popular culture. I like to take an image from an old mag and use it as a springboard to create an image that subverts or tweaks the initial intent even if it does not entirely decimate it.

A friend of mine used to binge on Mountain Dew, sometimes drinking a two liter bottle each day. What’s your addiction like?

I have been drinking at least 3 bottles a day for the last 22 years many times twice that much per day. My conservative guess is that I have downed 25 thousand bottles of mountain dew so far. Every one of them tastier than the one preceding it… It’s good and it even says so on some of the old bottles. “Mountain Dew is good!” was printed on the backs of the old bottles from the sixties. I also had accumulated a top tier collection of Mountain Dew Antiques (old bottles signs, store displays, etc). Of course I have had to sell some of it off over the years to help pay the bills when I have spent too much on art supplies. I love the color of the drink and the color of the packaging. Bright green and bright red, yet somehow nothing at all like Christmas.