\\KRUSTY//
• K R U S T Y •
"Turn the Walls and Monoliths of Modern Misery into Flowering Rubble"
"I’ve always been drawn to drawing or marking things in general--whether as a way to manifest what I want and can’t have or to document what I see and want to understand. I had an absurdly idyllic childhood that spoiled the shit out of me – I grew up in Ojai, now a celebrity spa town but then more of a sleepy artist’s haven, lived in Prague for a year when I was 7, did a foreign exchange in France when i was 11 – I didn’t realize how lucky I was until I left my hometown and got my head out of my ass – or most of it! My social life was another story- either cloying best friends or distant, cruel cliques, and drawing and reading were my way of re-framing and escaping the tensions and unknowns of the humans around me. I left home right as my family imploded and found myself in Berkeley goin' to school. It was rad, but all my friends were kinda bros—cue the entrance of Anjelica Colliard, guardian angel and art savior, whom i met while in Bordeaux “studying” abroad. I was a crazy overachiever in High School and this was the first time I let myself DGAF! It was amazing...after so many friends who either saw me as a novelty or a nuisance, here was a person who just liked doing stuff with me! And so many hot Frenchmen...sigh. Making zines, comics, and dancing all night opened up a freaky world of possibilities that I didn’t even feel worthy of. This was the pivotal moment! When I came back I wanted only to continue creating. I was an English and French major and continued on those tracks, but started making comics and throwing parties with my new crew of oddballs and mystics. Seized by a burning desire to draw more and more comics, I enrolled in this small master’s program in Angoulême, France, where I spent the 2 strangest years of my life. Now I am back in Oakland running an art gallery, performing jesterly feats as an occasional member of the band Dingbat Superminx, and trying to finish a comic biography of V Vale, an OG punk zinester in San Francisco. I am also trying to SLEEP and have fun and make gigantic comic paintings that people want to look at! My greatest accomplishment in life is organizing a dog fashion show that had a venue at capacity at exactly 4:20PM!!!"
//Still quite young, you've lived through and experienced things that most people dream of. As for manifesting things you want and can't have, what is one of your ultimate goals? Something you think is impossible or harder to accomplish/attain?
The thing I wish I were more disciplined about is MUSIC! I played sax, piano and guitar when I was a kid/teen, and started a few bands after college, but haven’t tried in earnest to create my own music in a while (even though I’m always writing down song ideas and singing to myself)! Being a performer in DBSM has been so illuminating, but as an inveterate mumbler I sometimes see my mime-esque expression making my vocal anxieties all the more pronounced, and it seems like making Animation and large scale murals/3D art are other art forms I wish I had infinite time to pursue! I also want to conjure peace and understanding between myself and my fellow humans which means a complete disintegration of the necropolitical hellscape that is late stage capitalism - and thats no easy feat!!! In my dreams I'm waving a flag with a big happy sun on it as a ragtag band of merrymakers sing songs to turn the walls and monoliths of modern misery into flowering rubble!
//Many artists draw inspiration from suffering or darkness in their life to push them into their projects. Through "cold cliques", imploding family and continuous changes in your life, do you feel the same?
Suffering and darkness are definitely behind a vast quantity of what I have made! I think I used to think it was the only valid source of inspiration (I blame my shameless descent into emo music for the worst parts of this fixation). Transmuting these negative things into jokes or poetry is a reassuring act, but I think it pushed me to seek out or at least accept deleterious or sordid situations because I had this grander alchemical scheme in mind. Now Im trying to balance that out with more calm self-reflection and appreciation for the people around me and how lucky I am to be aliiive at the same time as them! I'm a moody asss bitch (or have lived thinking that was an important part of my personality for many a moon) but I think I can face the world more happily and helpfully if I name the darkness, forgive the void (to quote my pal David Kleiser), and pull myself up out of muck I spilled on the floor just to see what it would look like...
//What drives you? What was your initial inspiration to be the person you are now?
Peeling back the layers of banality to reveal the sparkling and spicy insides of every moment! A key moment when drawing and writing became my way of reckoning with the world was when my I accidentally injured my hamster Popcorn when I was 6. I ripped his entire bottom jaw skin off in a dollhouse he got stuck in, and felt so guilty when he died a few days later. I drew Popcorn ascending to heaven on every surface I found, to the point where my parents sent me to therapy to deal with my delusional grief. I think that's the moment when I realized I could make images that moved me and affected other people. So recognizing mortality and the cruel shape of linear time were pivotal.
Harriet the Spy (the movie and book) are probably directly responsible for making me a dedicated journal-keeper. I do not leave home without a notebook! I still have my journals from 1st grade and they are these insane time capsules of my developing social brain. It's embarrassing but School of Rock turned my world upside down and I think I've got Jack Black to thank for melding my love of music with my distrust of authority. I babysat all summer to get a guitar after seeing it--which led to my guitar teacher showing me Daniel Johnston, whom I will love forever!!!! The frenzy of chance that is hanging out at record stores was pretty crucial--a lot of my teenage years were spent milling around Salzer's Records in Ventura, CA after going surfing with my best friend JOEY! Poring over the album art and lyrics and lore was so much fun and I always felt like I was being initiated into a sonic brotherhood of free spirits..
//Glad to hear you are trying to "SLEEP and have fun"! It sounds as though life has given you so many opportunities and chapters for you to discover and learn from... with more to come hopefully! Has any of this impacted your (mental/physical) health in any way?
I'm tired alll the time!!!! I tend to overbook and overcommit to things I want to be a part of, and as a consequence often forget to eat or prepare for my corporeal needs, so I'm pretty waifish right now. I used to drink pretty heavily, which got me into some absurd situations, but after working behind a bar and getting bored of hangovers, that's not so much of a problem these days. I do smoke mad spliffs though, so...yeah (don't tell my mom). My membership at the Oakland YMCA has been a godsend - so for now I'm fit as a fiddle(ish!)...a fiddle that's been left out in the rain a few times.
//What was it like going to comic book school in France? Were there any other women in the program?
It was a complete 180 from Berkeley! I was used to detailed syllabuses, super invested, performative professors, and regular homework, readings, exams, etc. At EESI (École européenne supérieure de l'image), it was so much more loose and had a completely diffferent rhythm and structure. The program was very small, and maybe 60% women actually (in a group of 25 or so). The school was tiny, only 300 people, in an old papermill town that became the comics hub of Europe in the 70s with the international comics festival. We had a lot of freedom and the school was funky and kind of intimate - people would have parties on the lawn, take over the main building to do techno shows, some kids built a raft as part of their final exam and floated it across the river. My favourite guy was the janitor, in the mornings I'd find him in his shed and we'd drink shitty coffee and watch the mist rise on the water. There was much more of a horizontal relationship between teachers and students, which I was unsure of how to approach at first, but by the end of it I was raging with a professor trying to teach him 'les danses sataniques', so I think I got in the hang of things. I had to write 2 whole theses so my French got really good - now I'm working with them again and I feel the difference 2 years has made! I feel like a dumdum! I'm grateful I did it, I met some amazing people and drew a lot and had to do it all alone! But being stuck in a tiny town after going to punk shows every other day in Oakland was a SHOCK! It got claustrophobic near the end, when everyone knew everyone's business (I was the only American in the program), the incestuous art school love triangles and general drama were so INTENSE!!!!!!! But great comics material, now that I have some distance from it all...
//Can you tell us what it's like to collaborate with V Vale & Anjelica Colliard? Why do you work with them as regularly as you do and how do they inspire you?
Vale is like my zine mentor, and Anjelica is like my sweet anchor of calm and beauty. Working with Vale is like opening up a box of treasure - there is so much happening, you go in his house and you feel and see 60+ years of artifacts and experiences on the walls of his apartment in North Beach, a stone's throw from City Lights Books. I am trying to do his biography, but it is a constant tug-of-war between the image someone has of their life, the notes they took on it, and their current situation (not to mention his wife Marian's interjections, which always add another dimension to his stories...). Anjelica is one of those friends who I can always count on, and who is amazing to collaborate with. We have complementary styles and skills, and she is definitely much more technically savvy than I about a lot of things. Her patience and attention to detail balances out my frenetic desire to get things done so I can go have fun. Jelli is also an amazing cook and human being so I learn a lot about how to be less of a sad goblin girl from her.
//When you got the ball rolling for the dog fashion show, were you high? What was it like seeing that come to fruition?
Ha! Yes I was slightly jangleberried......but seeing it come to fruition was a total surprise!!! I came up with it as a joke when me and some pals were planning the first FILF (a music/fashion show extravagaaaanza we've done 3 times since). I invited people super last minute to be a part of it as the opening ceremony. I was in disbelief when a bevy of festooned hounds showed up and I got to introduce them as they strutted down the walkway. I decided to do my own event last year, which went AMAZINGLY well, and I'm about to host the 2nd one on September 27th! Funnily enough, it made me feel really hopeful about how people are ready to deliver surprises if you create space for them to do so!
//Why are zines still important?
People use them for so many different purposes! I love them as crystallizations of moments and friendships, as manifestoes of refusal, unbridled anger or joy, and just as pleasing art objects in general! I think they are important now because people crave non-screen images, objects that were made by voluntary hands, and the magical moment of exchange where you often get to meet the author or artist directly. So much of life is abstracted, diluted, deranged, because it has to travel through commercial sphincters to get to us. The DIY spirit is all the more necessary when we see how little governments give a shit about us getting literal or figurative bread, let alone roses.
//'Krusty Wheatfield' is a name that doesn't announce its' gender, when you started using the name, was it a way to subvert attention from your gender? (Comics being a male dominated world and all...)
I didn't come up with it - my friends started calling me Krusty, I believe, because I was always eatin' the crusts people left behind when we were living in a wild art house with none other than MIKE LONG in attendance! <3 It was the kind of house where there was a party almost every night and everyone was always piled in the living room playing games and cracking up. *wistful gaze* At one point I noticed that my pal Caity had me saved as Krusty Wheatfield in her phone, which I thought was really funny cause it looked like the shape of my name but was way better! I started taggin' it everywhere, and ended up making a few comic books with Krusty Wheatfield as my pseudonym. It just kinda stuck. I always felt kind of meh about my name (and my gender's lot on this earth) so taking on a different name that evoked the edges of things (and bread! my favourite food) was a no-brainer. I was calling myself Whims for a while but I got tired of it cause it was too...whimsical. Vale thinks I should change my pseudonym to Slim West, which I think is way too slick for me...and sounds like a brand of cigarettes. And I'm always happy to deflect attention from my gender!
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