Kyle Parker’s got a whole lot of great drawings. The ones you tend to notice first, though, are the ones with small, simple line drawings and pithy, evocative captions. The drawings are similar to something you might have scribbled on the back of your notebook at some point, while the captions are something, say, Edward Ruscha might have scribbled on the back of his. While Parker’s more grounded work is darkly (and often ingeniously) funny and direct, his more abstract pieces also manage to successfully suss out the humor and fragility lurking all over the place in this existence of ours. We interviewed him via email about David Shrigley, a necklace, and the Miracle of the Sun.
Whose Fault Is That?: What is your favorite year, whether you were alive or not, and why?
Kyle Parker: I guess it has to be from this decade because I don’t know anything about history, and if I think too far back in my life I can’t remember anything in terms of whole years. And I think every year since 2002 has had some sort of terrible shit in it. So I guess I will say 2001. I turned 14 and had a girlfriend for the first time. That was neat.
WFIT: Your illustrations have a sort of immediate, messy evocativeness to them that often seems stream-of-consciousness, but their tendency to be concise and profound suggests otherwise. To what extent are your pieces off-the-cuff, as opposed to thought out in advance?
KP: A lot of my work from 2006 was more stream-of-consciousness because I was living alone in a small room in San Francisco and just drawing to keep myself awake for as long as possible. But besides that I mostly think them out in advance. Most of the time the words come to me first and stick in my head until I put them on paper and try to make a drawing to match them. Sometimes the drawings are planned in advance, too, and sometimes they are improvised. I don’t have one fixed method and many drawings are arrived at differently.
WFIT: Compared to your impressionistic musical output, which can get pretty impressionistic and noisy, your body of visual art is relatively grounded in meaning. Can you think of any reasons why this might be?
KP: Well, the music started in late 2007 and I think since then my visual interests have slowly started lining up more with the musical ones. In the past my drawings were mostly grounded in figures and speech bubbles and all that, and sometimes they still are but not as much. In the last year especially I’ve gotten more interested in abstract color forms and patterns but I’ll still attach words to them. These are similar to my songs for me because there’s no rhythm or lyrics and the only way they can communicate concretely is through the title.
WFIT: Do you have a favorite conspiracy theory or unsolved crime? I am
partial to the Dyatlov Pass Incident.
KP: This doesn’t exactly fall into those categories but I read about the Miracle of the Sun last year in a Robert Anton Wilson book and that sounded pretty good.
WFIT: Your drawings have the aura of something created during a boring
algebra class or meeting. Would you say your creative process involves on-the-fly production such as that, or are you more of an I-will-sit-down-and-draw-now type?
KP: I definitely try to sit and draw, with very mixed results. I am usually struggling between the methods of only drawing when you feel like it versus forcing yourself to keep drawing until you make something you like.
WFIT: What would you say is the best thing that’s happened to you as a result of your drawings?
KP: It’s hard to think about. Any sense of fulfillment or purpose drawing ever gave me did not last long enough to embed it in my memory, so that’s probably not it. I do have a necklace that was given to me by a beautiful girl I met a year and a half ago. If I never drew anything I would not have met her or the necklace. So.
WFIT: Is there one of your drawings that you think best encapsulates whatever it is you’re going for? This is probably just a fancy way of asking if you have a favorite.
For a long time it seemed to be this one from 2006:
because I remember making it and how it seemed to just fall out of me. The songs and drawings that I always like most are the ones that feel like I had almost no part in making. Like I technically own them but I didn’t create them. I think the most recent drawing that I felt this way about was this one:
WFIT: To what extent would you say the often hilariously resigned atmosphere of your illustrations is representative of your overall worldview?
KP: I have not looked at it this way very consciously before but the drawings do tend to stick pretty closely to how I’m looking at life at the time. When I started at 14 or so the drawings were happy and goofy because life was happy and goofy. Then for a couple years everything revolved around being alone and dying, and later it was failing and dying. Then in 2007 I barely drew anything, so who knows what worldview that reflected. Then last year life was a weird dream. And now life seems to be some beautiful terrible joke.
WFIT: What are some artists, any medium, current or otherwise, that you hold as inspirations?
KP: Whenever I see an artist’s work that should inspire me what I usually think instead is “this person is already doing what I have been trying to do; why am I doing what I do?” So instead I try to not look at their work at all. I am also afraid of seeing things I admire and then subconsciously ripping them off in my work later. Some of these people are Chris Johanson, Dave Shrigley, and Mike Mills.
Comic artist CF also has work that I admire and don’t look at very often, but he does inspire me more directly through his general attitudes toward making music and drawings. Ideas like “Let your ambitions die” and “Don’t take it so seriously”.
WFIT: On a similar note, are there are any musicians or illustrators currently working that you think deserve more attention?
KP: I think anyone I know of is already getting the attention they deserve, which is good.
WFIT: I’m a fan of your photography, particularly your cityscapes and portraits. Why’d you stop photographing in 2007?
KP: I didn’t really stop taking photos I just stopped updating them on the website. I put them up there to add more content to the site but I always got the sense that nobody really cared about them. I am sitting on a lot of photos but I don’t know how I feel about putting them online. I have mostly been lending them out to friends as cover art for their music and stuff.
WFIT: Do you have any artistic plans for the future? I feel like your art is particularly well-suited for a print collection.
KP: I’ve had a book contract signed with a small press company for a while but I honestly have no idea what the status is on that.
Other than that I just started reading a self help book about “regaining your creativity” so we’ll see how that goes. And sometimes I have fantasized about getting involved in the gallery world just to take some of those absurd amounts of money thrown around and donate them to charity. It is all up in the air, really.
Joe Bernardi interviewed Kyle Parker in March 2009. Kyle has a portfolio, and his musical project, Infinite Body, can be found on Myspace.