Sean Yseult

It’s called The Saint.

I’ve been down there ever since White Zombie broke up.

Yeah, I fell in love with it while we were on tour and decided I had to live there one day. I picked up and moved.

No I run it out of New Orleans, New York and LA. It’s a little tricky. I’ve a friend in LA that helps. It’s all over the place but we manage somehow.

Yeah, pretty much.

I just do these graphics and I wanted to get them printed on silk scarves because I had some childhood memory of my mom having Peter Max scarves and I thought they looked cool. So I did that and I got into a lot of boutiques. Then a lot of people at trade shows approached me to license them out. I’m not involved in that, it is like a record deal where they pay me royalties. Now they use them on Verizon Cingular wallpapers. iPop, who represents Andy Warhol, approached me about doing magnets. They are like these cool half semi-circle glass magnets. They did a whole bunch of my designs and it’s nice because it’s no work for me and I get a paycheck every so often. I’ve only been doing this for a year so it’s all happening pretty fast. I’m actually in another gallery in New Orleans and they put on a show of my designs and I’m having a bunch of them framed. That’s happening in May.

Yeah, I actually went to school for design. I was thinking more along the lines of getting involved with a magazine or doing CD graphics and posters. I’ve done a lot of that in the past and this stuff that I’m doing now is something I just started doing after the hurricane. I just drew in my sketchbook, stream of consciousness type stuff. I don’t really think about them so I draw them really quickly. I draw them with pen on paper, so everyone has their own flaws. It’s something I started doing to occupy my mind after the hurricane. We were so confused for a while because we were displaced for a few months.

We evacuated a day or two in time but we weren’t able to return home for a while. We got a sublet in New York and went to Europe for a little bit. That’s when I started the business. I said, “Ok, I’m going to something with these drawings.”

I do them all by hand with pen on paper so there are no corrections. So I can’t make a mistake or if I do make a mistake, I leave it in there.

[laughs] Some eyeballs and skulls and guts and things, right?

I know what you’re trying to say. It’s nothing like you would expect from a member of White Zombie. But it is not really anything I even expected from myself. I don’t really know where it comes from. To be honest, it is a lot like the drawings I used to do when I was little and now I am doing it again. It goes back to childhood influences like Peter Max, Aubrey Beardsley and stuff that was laying around the house when I was little. It’s a little incongruous from what I did with White Zombie and even the other bands. It’s just how I draw.

No, not at all. The stuff I did in design school and with the band was always with photography and typography. I wasn’t drawing at all. I didn’t even think about drawing for some reason. After the hurricane, I just started drawing for some reason. It’s all abstract graphics and some of it is a little more free and M.C. Escher-ish but not really. There’s never anything based on reality.

I would like to branch out and do more things. I accidentally fell into fashion by making silk scarves. It’s funny because I don’t really know much about the fashion world. It’s a whole new world I have to learn about and I just want to design stuff. I’d love to get my graphics on more things like posters and even home furnishings. I actually have some of the graphics that I’ve done that I’m getting ready to have printed on these metal business cardholders and cigarette cases where it’s like an enamel raised surface with the graphics. I’m having those made right now and I’d love to do more licensing deals and keep drawing.

I sell them through the website and then they are also in a good number of boutiques. I have a couple of showrooms now, one in New York and one in London, so they’re doing a lot of selling for me which is nice. I don’t have to worry about that at all.

I said that? [laughs]

A lot of people have mistaken me for a guy, in the early White Zombie days, even when I was wearing hot pants. I’ve always enjoyed that ambiguous quality though. I don’t know that I was trying to obscure anything but I guess it’s more who I am.

No, because I can’t stand to put on a dress. I’m so much more comfortable in a men’s fitted suit. I’ve definitely got my ideas of how I should dress and who I am. I’m just not really comfortable with the girly girly clothes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but it’s just not me.

I have been playing locally in New Orleans with Rock City Morgue. But I don’t have a lot of time for it. It’s on the backburner and everyone else in the band has other things too. We tour some in the US and in Europe. But we don’t really have time for it.

I wouldn’t say that but not good [laughs].

It was all one and the same. I’ll put it this way, he doesn’t speak to me but he also doesn’t speak to Jay [Noel Yuenger] or Johnny [Tempesta]. The three of us are all friends and then there’s Rob. I can’t really speak for him as to why he’s like that or what brought that on. It didn’t help that for the first seven years of the band we were a couple and after that we weren’t. That was a mutual split between the two of us and the band continued but it definitely changed things a lot. Rob obviously wanted to go in this remix dance direction or whatever you want to call it. There’s not a lot of room for creating riffs so it squeezes out the musicians. We weren’t interested in making that music and he was.

Well everything is intact. I had a lot of damage but it missed nearly everything I own in the house for some weird reason. My neighborhood didn’t flood but everybody had roof damage. I got like a museum going on downstairs with a human skeleton and a coffin and some other oddities.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck