Dr. Sketchy's


Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School

Anita Vidot as Mistress Elena

 

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Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School

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Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School is both a burlesque cabaret and life drawing event originated in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at the Lucky Cat. Dr. Sketchy's was founded in New York City in 2005, by illustrator and former artist's model Molly Crabapple and illustrator A.V. Phibes. Phibes later left to attend to her design studio.

A Dr. Sketchy's class consists of a burlesque dancer (or other performer) modeling, with drawing contests during breaks. Sketchers are known as "art monkeys", a term borrowed from the Madagascar Institute. Dr. Sketchy's features heavy drinking games and onstage go-go dancing. It's alcoholic content was created by John Leavitt, a cartoonist for The New Yorker referred to as a "wino" by The Village Voice.

Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School was featured in episode 219 of "Deadline" on HD.net.

Time Out NY magazine featured Dr. Sketchy's in "The Scene" section in issue 555, May 18th-24th, 2006.

In spring 2006, Dr. Sketchy's went from a New York event to an international franchise. As of December 2006, Dr. Sketchy's branches exist in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Norfolk, London, Detroit, Philadelphia, Toronto, Scotland, Portland, Denmark, Melbourne, Raleigh, Auckland and Austin. Branches vary in their conservatism, nudity levels and the skill of their artists. However, Ms. Crabapple insists that they pay their models high wages.

The Official Dr. Sketchy's Rainy Day Colouring Book, by Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt, was released by Sepulculture DIY publishing in December 2006. It is also distributed in the UK, by Freak Ash Books. (Credit: Wikipedia).

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Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School

Dr. Sketchy's Sydney, Australia MySpace

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Another model of art class
Burlesque folk posing in a restaurant — must be Dr. Sketchy's.
By Justin Hampton, Special to The Times
January 4, 2007
(Credit: LA Times)

There's no crisis of artistic inspiration that a $5 mojito and a dancer in G-string and pasties can't fix. Just ask the subculturally minded students of Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School, an international string of life-drawing classes that has recently established biweekly sessions at the Bungalow Club in Hollywood.

Since taking over the restaurant's ornately appointed upstairs area in October, the good doctor has attracted photographers and name outsider artists such as Van Arno and Audrey Kawasaki to render L.A. burlesque luminaries — such as Velvet Hammer's Nina La Fiamma and Jewel of Denial — as best they can during happy hour. It's strong medicine, to say the least.

Dr. Sketchy was first realized more than a year ago in New York City by Brooklyn-born illustrator Molly Crabapple, a.k.a. Jen Caban, and artist A.V. Phibes. Nowadays, Crabapple counts Los Angeles among 13 other currently operating classes around the world, with new classes in Toronto, Berlin and San Francisco opening in a month.

For all these classes, Crabapple insists, albeit from a distance, that certain guidelines listed on the class website (www.drsketchy.com) be adhered to. "Most Dr. Sketchy's have a sort of irreverence," she says. "They're throwing contests. There's drinking. It's not just sitting silently and concentrating on people's rib cages and muscles."

Like Crabapple, the local head of Dr. Sketchy's Los Angeles, Kat Bardot, a.k.a. Katie Schiff, also possesses the requisite art school pedigree and burlesque background needed to get Dr. Sketchy off and running wildly into the L.A. art scene. Starting the class in October, Bardot implemented the basic Sketchy's class format of introducing the model, who occasionally does a show for the artists, and then handing her over to the artists and photographers for sessions that range from 10 one-minute sketches with the model fully costumed to the final 30-minute session in which the model is only partially nude.

Municipal laws routinely prohibit the combination of alcohol and female nudity in unlicensed venues, but for some students, such as Kathy Zandueta, this works out perfectly. "I liked that it was not all nude figure drawing, that there was also gonna be some costumes," she says. "I liked that there was burlesque. And I like that it's dancers, because dancers know how the body moves."

OTHER life drawing classes in the area, such as the long-running Drawing Club, also use models from underground scenes such as burlesque and roller derby. In addition, Crabapple has also plied her New York classes with drinking games and contests that award prizes for best use of a woodland animal in a sketch, so Bardot hopes to shake up the admittedly rote procedure of her current classes with similarly themed contests and models from the fetish and punk-circus sideshow communities.

But because anti-art cannot be taught, Bardot pledges never to provide instruction or to moderate for her class. "It's more about the experience and practice, really," she says. "People take the ideas they get at Dr. Sketchy and go home, do a painting inspired by that session. It's more really of an open forum and not a formalized class."

Regardless, it is an evolving brand, with support from art journal Juxtapoz connecting the class with its target market and "Dr. Sketchy's Coloring Book," Crabapple's smartly snarky hagiography of the art school's genesis, selling out its first printing.

However, the goal, at least locally for Bardot, is quite simple.

"I just want people to catch on to an alternative type of figure drawing to art," she says. "I had figure drawing classes through art school and had some unfortunate-looking models in some terrible poses. I wanna break free of all that and have people see burlesque in a different way."
weekend@latimes.com

 

 

Moulin Rouge in the Face

Illustratrix Molly Crabapple is making sex silly, and the silly sexy, by Brandon Reynolds

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec toddled happily around that late-19th-century Paris of Bohemian excess, dancing girls, and a dose of syphilis with every shot of absinthe. The little guy created images in paintings and posters that became icons of A Time That Was Really Great, But That You Just Missed.

As Toulouse-Lautrec probably was no great dancer, he experienced most of the action offstage. But for young illustratrix Molly Crabapple, part of the swelling burlesque underworld in New York City, ideas come from experiences on both sides of the easel.

Crabapple, the alter ego of one Jen Caban, 23, a proud art-school dropout from the Fashion Institute of Technology, has done her time in photographers’ clutches and in drafty artists’ studios, making ends meet as a model and Pretty Face of the Burlesque Revolution. She was a Suicide Girl when she was 19, a model for the popular naked-girl Web site, www.suicidegirls.com, that glorifies tattoos, piercings and a general nonmainstream lifestyle (and which has been criticized in recent years for alleged mismanagement of the models. Crabapple has nothing nice to say about it).

All the while she’s doodled away, honing a style of illustration that celebrates bosoms, corsets and the occasional monkey. It got her drawing gigs at those three great bastions of journalism: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Playgirl.

“I’ve always preferred being the objectifier rather than the objectified,” she declares from her New York lair. “I find illustrating far more freeing than modeling.”

Crabapple talks very fast -- a New York girl -- but indulges in words as over a tray of sushi, so when she says “actually,” six or seven hidden syllables are revealed. It’s a sign of a certain kind of energy that propelled her across the world for a year when she was 17, drawing relentlessly, picking up languages. The kind of energy that inspired her to start a school.

Perhaps still shuddering over the chilliness of the model’s stool, Crabapple and fellow illustrator A.V. Phibes created “Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School” in Brooklyn in late 2005. The pair offered up pretty ladies, handsome lads and the occasional human oddity to an eager and growing community of artists-without-models. They also made it a point to pay the models well, a personal belief of Crabapple’s.

Perhaps because sexy mixed with a dollop of silly is a universal recipe, Dr. Sketchy’s has taken off, with branches in 20 locations around the world, from Edinburgh to San Francisco, with new franchises recently opened in Helsinki, Rome, Sydney and Boston. So if you’re ever in Finland with a spare crayon and a libido …

The work has resulted in a book, “Dr. Sketchy’s Official Rainy Day Colouring Book,” a sardonic and garter-belted volume of paper dolls, coloring-book activities, true and fabricated histories, and a guide to sketching beautiful women.

“It’s sort of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ for perverts,” she says, “or R. Crumb without the misogyny.” Whatever it is, it means the bright-eyed Crabapple has to bottle that absinthine energy and hit the road again for a book tour. Which means Richmond, soon enough, will bear witness to its own mini-Dr. Sketchy’s class. Which means a Richmonder with a crayon and a dream will get the chance to scribble Mimi Noir (of local troupe Nouvelle Burlesque) and perhaps win prizes. Or at least get the creative juices stirred. Some kind of juices anyway.

Then Crabapple will pack up all her pencils and perversions, her sex and syllables, and hit the road again, spreading the good word of Times That Are Really Great and thinking about how the world should be.

“I wish I could draw more naked gentlemen,” she sighs, “but they’re just not profitable.” S

Molly Crabapple brings “Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School” to Chop Suey Books March 2, 6-8 p.m. Free. 497-4705.

Visit Molly Crabapple's website.

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