Molly Crabapple is my new hero. When I emailed her to set up some time for me to meet her and watch her in action, she replied, “I’m pretty much ALWAYS working.” It’s true. You’d need to hire an assistant just to keep up with this girl. With this much success at age 27, its hard not to wonder how she got to this point.
She’s currently gearing up for ‘Molly Crabapple’s Week in Hell.’ During this week she will cover a hotel room in paper from floor to ceiling, essentially lock herself in the room and see what she can come up with. A few friends are allowed to visit, she plans to eat regular meals, but she will be deprived of most comforts and distractions. Many artists have gone insane gradually and on accident but during this project Molly will make a deliberate push to lose her mind. The idea is to force herself beyond her normal limits, to “draw so much that you’ve gone beyond what naturally comes to your mind, the cliches and the obvious,” she said. This girl has got some gumption and I can’t wait to see what she produces when she’s left with no inhibitions.
This list of projects that are in progress/just finished is lengthy: She just started ‘Saints and Sinners’ where she draws historical figures like Alister Crowley and Alcebiades. She just finished ‘Sixty Six Project’ where she drew 66 of her friends because she “wanted to look at my friends faces.” There is a documentary on erotic comics in the works where she is the “Elvira of the project,” (not a lot of imagination needed there) and wears a dress and points at comics. A tiny paper puppet stop motion animation (say that five times fast) called ‘I Have Your Heart,’ illustrated with Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt is in production stages. She’s illustrating ‘Straw House,’ a graphic novel with John Leavitt where a carnival made up of infamous humans from different times in history stops in an Appalachian town and all hell breaks loose as immortality collides with folk traditions. A book about Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, the founding of which first garnered Molly so much attention (“I think artists are lonely dorks,” she said to explain the project’s success), is also in the works.
So at this point in the story most struggling artists eyes are turning as green as the Empire State Building on some holiday where they make that thing glow green. My interview takes a dramatic turn from like, “Sooo what are you doing these days?” to “Okay back up. Explain to me how you got here,” and I admit to Molly that I’m asking because I’m jealous.
She dropped out of art school at FIT, says it was a total joke, but started making a decent living as an artist by 23. She admits that between 18 and now she’s has some seriously odd jobs including many a model sittings but that the weirdest was when she was hired by a conceptual artist to whisper slowly and creepily, “This is the life,” in peoples ears as they looked at the art at PS1. So lets just say the woman has paid her dues. It’s obvious, when peering about her big, perfectly cluttered Financial District loft, that she deserves all the recognition she’s getting. She’s got finished pieces and in-progress pieces all over the place and readily admits she has no life outside of work. Plus, she gets a ton of her funding from Kickstarter, which I think is pretty rad. She raised $25,000 for the ‘Week in Hell’ project! There is a new wave of working artists out there who’ve paved a new route to success and Crabapple is leading the group. But I’d be surprised to her hear boast. “Being able to make a living in your own style is a real privilege,” she said with a calm smile. At the same time, I noticed a flash of nerve and initiative behind those big, humble eyes that let me know we ain’t seen nothin’ yet from the fabulous Miss Molly Crabapple.
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Words and images by Courtney Dudley
