Molly Crabapple Quotes & Sayings

The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art. — Molly Crabapple

Sketching in general - anywhere, not just in Gitmo, but in life, in the world - is a profoundly disruptive act. Because you're creating something when you're kind of expected to consume or sit passively. I've always sketched things as a way to get into them, whether it was a fancy nightclub or, you know, to have kids think I was cool, whatever. — Molly Crabapple

I hated being a child because to be a child means that you are essentially the property of your parents, benevolently or not. — Molly Crabapple

Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.

Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have. — Molly Crabapple

I travel so much that when I'm not traveling, I'm just kind of curled up in a ball here, not wanting to leave or see anyone. — Molly Crabapple

Neutrality and boredom are the weapons of the state. — Molly Crabapple

No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more. — Molly Crabapple

I didn't want to be beholden to one person. So I did something where I had hundreds of people who backed the work. I could just do work, and since a lot of people were interested in it, I wasn't beholden to any particular one of them. — Molly Crabapple

New York makes me swoony and in love. The New York of the 1880s was a place where black eye fixers did a brisk business and people were routinely killed for their shoes. But, the constant aspiration of the city never changes. — Molly Crabapple

Mainstream feminism might remember that the war on women always starts with the war on whores. — Molly Crabapple

When you're an outsider, you don't have loyalties to anyone, so you can be cruelly honest if need be. The more you get inside, the more you are involved in polite networks of professional coercion that make people less honest. — Molly Crabapple

I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they're - have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own bed, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student. I was a brat. If I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself. — Molly Crabapple

Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses. — Molly Crabapple

A lot of things sound neutral, but they're not. A typical example would involve police violence. It's usually forbidden to call police "murderers," even if they're convicted of murder. People will say that it sounds hysterical and unobjective. — Molly Crabapple

I feel like the traditional patron system meant that you would kiss the ass of one rich person and then hide all of the financial goings-on of your work, and you could pretend you were pure. — Molly Crabapple

I had difficulty being friends with women who hadn't worked in either the sex or beauty industries. I felt like other women sometimes overvalued beauty and sexuality, when in actuality, they're just parts of a job. — Molly Crabapple

Globalism has less leeway for a poor country's brilliant sons. — Molly Crabapple

I am lucky because I do fine art, and that is half of my living. And then illustration provides the other half. — Molly Crabapple

Historically, the women who have been the great painters of the canon have very often have been the wives or daughters of supportive men. Like Artemisia, whose father was a very established painter. I will say that the two current contemporary artists I admire the most are women: Kara Walker and Swoon. — Molly Crabapple

We clung to each other, as bookish young people often do, while waiting out the years until our real lives could begin. At — Molly Crabapple

The first time I made any money, I was 27. I went to Bergdorf's looking like a proper guttersnipe and bought a pair of Louboutins. I'd wear them and an old ink-stained kimono and make my drawings and feel indomitable. — Molly Crabapple

If there's a theme in my work, it's that I like to focus on smart people who are facing oppression and who are fighting back against it. — Molly Crabapple

I'm an artist and a journalist. I travel around the world very often for 'Vice Magazine,' and I draw and I write about prisons, about conflict zones. — Molly Crabapple

I've become increasingly agoraphobic. — Molly Crabapple

To make someone love you, see them as the person they want to be. — Molly Crabapple

When you live in New York and are an artist and are interested in people, you meet a lot of people. — Molly Crabapple

Art is much more confined by materials than writing is. — Molly Crabapple

I've just found the stories of the people I'm talking to much more interesting than my reactions to them. — Molly Crabapple

I think Picasso was someone who took art's powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That's something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now. — Molly Crabapple

The truth is, the vast majority of medical care for lower income people in America is shitty. If you go to a free clinic to receive any form of care, the majority of those will be overcrowded with nurses who are tired because they have to work with so many people. We are not a country that invests public money into taking care of poor people, so we usually rely on clinics with very overburdened and underpaid staff. — Molly Crabapple

I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love. — Molly Crabapple

When I started my own business, I funded it as a naked model. I still think that the sex industry can, for some men and women, be a powerful tool for improving their financial prospects. — Molly Crabapple

Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do. — Molly Crabapple

I absorbed the lie that any smart woman would use birth control and be responsible for her body. Obviously that's not true. — Molly Crabapple

Talent is essential, but cash buys the opportunity for that talent to be discovered. To pretend otherwise is to spit in the face of every broke genius. — Molly Crabapple

When you hold a graphic novel in your hands, you're holding artist blood made ink. — Molly Crabapple

The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body. — Molly Crabapple

I'm only the third artist who's ever drawn at Gitmo. — Molly Crabapple

Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.' — Molly Crabapple

My technique of working is I go around with my iPhone and with my sketchbook. I take thousands and thousands and thousands of iPhone photos. I also draw from life. I can draw really, really, really fast. It's a way that I build a rapport with people. — Molly Crabapple

The main difference between illustration and comics is that comics are much, much more work. Every comics page is the equivalent of six to nine illustrations. — Molly Crabapple

I was involved in Occupy Wall Street as a participant and poster artist. 'Shell Game' is an attempt to do something bigger, to use whatever artistic powers I have to explore the excitements and betrayals of that year. — Molly Crabapple

Different types of sex work are differently supportive. If I were working in a strip club, I would be competing with my colleagues, and while there would be support, there would be financial motivation not to offer too much support. — Molly Crabapple

Despite everything we know about photo manipulation, a photo is still considered an objective document. — Molly Crabapple

You start like a white blanket and you have to preserve that, and each year that you live chips away at your essential value. — Molly Crabapple

You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it. — Molly Crabapple

I love comics, but I'd rather cut off my thumbs than do nothing but. — Molly Crabapple

Sketching is like dancing. It's process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that. — Molly Crabapple

Innocence is always the state of being untouched. Sometimes it's synonymous with virginity, so sometimes it's quite literal, but sometimes it's more of a mental state of being untouched, of not having seen a lot of the world. — Molly Crabapple

I forced myself to comply. When the media reports that a suspect in custody was killed after resisting arrest, they never tell you how hard it is to assist passively with your own kidnapping. They never talk about the discipline it takes to submit. — Molly Crabapple

You're demonstrating your own skills in a vulnerable way when you draw. — Molly Crabapple

The occupation is really terrible on a variety of levels. It's terrible on the "shooting people and torturing people in prison" level. But I think the thing that is very hard to convey is that it's also this bureaucratic grinding-down and daily humiliation that I think would probably be as horrible as the spectacular violence. — Molly Crabapple

The thing that I hate is that Nicholas Kristof style of writing where it's like, "I saw the poor, they made me so sad. What can I do about sadness? I am so brave." It's just like, shut up, man, shut up. — Molly Crabapple

Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you. — Molly Crabapple

When virtue was spoken of in the classical sense, for men, it always meant bravery or protecting others or being an adventurer and going out into the world - whereas a woman's virtue meant keeping her legs closed. — Molly Crabapple

My real name - my real name is Jennifer Caban. — Molly Crabapple

A woman's beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We're meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we're fat. Beauty is Zeno's paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it's not socially acceptable to admit we're there. We can't perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming 'nice tits. — Molly Crabapple

I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist. — Molly Crabapple

Art is for the elite because it has a very high price-point of entry. And when one is in that social strata, they look down at illustrators because they just draw things directly for a few hundred dollars, and that's seen as being a bit grubby. Galleries allow artists to stay relatively divorced from the financial aspects of their trade. — Molly Crabapple

Why did we sleep together, dubiously queer girls that we were? Desire is fluid, but I think Jen and I fucked each other because we wanted to stand by ourselves. Were we not sweet enough for men? Were they put off by our ambition, how fast we talked, how needy we grew? We wouldn't contort ourselves for their desires. Our faces were the same size as we kissed. We were equals. We needed no masculine protection. We would protect each other. We could protect ourselves. — Molly Crabapple

I grew up in Far Rockaway and then Long Island. — Molly Crabapple

Under bare lightbulbs, artists painted phantasmagorias powerful enough to threaten armies. — Molly Crabapple

Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on. — Molly Crabapple