Dr.
Sketchy's Anti-Art School

Anita
Vidot as Mistress Elena

Websites
Dr.
Sketchy's Anti-Art School
Dr.
Sketchy's Sydney, Australia MySpace
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).
Websites
Dr.
Sketchy's Anti-Art School
Dr.
Sketchy's Sydney, Australia MySpace
Dr.
Sketchy's Jac Bowie PR

Dr.
Sketchy book - chick
to buy it.
Profiles
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Molly
Crabapple
Burlesque
Art
Articles
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 shes 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.
Ive
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. Its 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 models
stool, Crabapple and fellow illustrator A.V. Phibes
created Dr. Sketchys 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 Crabapples.
Perhaps
because sexy mixed with a dollop of silly is a universal
recipe, Dr. Sketchys 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 youre
ever in Finland with a spare crayon and a libido
The
work has resulted in a book, Dr. Sketchys
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.
Its
sort of Wheres 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. Sketchys
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 theyre just not profitable.
S
Molly
Crabapple brings Dr. Sketchys 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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