Theres no denying it, Jim Woodring is just plain weird. But thank god he is because hes produced some of the most bizarre and indelible images ever. He introduced himself to the world with his autobiographical work Jim and then his freaky little woodland type creature Frank. Now hes collected a number of his images in the book Seeing Things.
Buy Seeing Things
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Jim Woodring: Today, Im painting covers and doing designs for these cardboard boxes that these Japanese Frank toys are going to come in. I designed it, but this company Presspop built these plastic Frank figures. Theyre actually kind of big at about eight inches tall. His two companion accomplices are with him and theyre in these boxes Im designing and they should be sold this year.
DRE: Are they a limited edition type thing?
JW: No, its not limited edition. Although I dont know what theyre going to cost. It might turn out to be a limited edition simply by virtue of being overpriced. Theyre just toys; little articulated figures that come in a box and Im trying to package them as enticingly as possible. The tops of the boxes are going to be watercolor vignettes showing the characters and then there will be a label on the sides. I hope it works out. Im in the early planning stages so Im not entirely sure Im on the right track, but I hope so.
DRE: Since the new book is called Seeing Things. Does that mean, this is how you see the world?
JW: In some ways it is how I see the world. At least some aspects of it. I guess its more a reflection of how I would see the world if I could see the things Im thinking about.
DRE: Do you want to see the things youre thinking about?
JW: I dont really have a choice. I could jettison my perspective and try to be a more normal person, but I dont think Id succeed at that. I think Id just be empty. I dont think I could replace it with something more conventional. Thats not an option for me.
DRE: When you look at a frog, do you see it as the way you later draw would draw it? Or is it later when you go, Its time for me to draw that the frogs come out that way?
JW: Well, if you notice there are no human beings in that book. I tend to use frogs as stand-ins for human beings, because when it comes drawing people for symbolic pictures, I never quite know how to go about doing it. If you draw them so that theyre like portraits, then the picture becomes about that personality. But if you just draw placeholders the figures tend to be very minimalist. They dont have a lot of personality. Its hard for me to know how to draw people, so I draw frogs because to me theyre kind of stripped-down versions of human beings.
DRE: What do you see in frogs that others dont?
JW: Ive always been fascinated by frogs and Ive always loved to look at them. Theyre good food for thought. I guess in France theyre just good food. They have a lot of interesting attributes. If you have a spiritual event; theyre amazing because theyll just sit still as if theyre meditating for a long period of time, but theyre never out of it. They always notice when a shadow approaches and then they move like greased lightning. They live on the land and in the water. That amphibious quality is something you can compare to the way people live in both the animal and the spiritual world. Theyre strangely anthropomorphic. They almost seem to have hands. They have faces you can read expressions in more readily than you can read them on the faces of other animals. I dont know what it is but theyre easier to figure out than people. I guess the reason why I dont draw people very much is because I dont understand them. I dont understand us so I never quite know what to show. Its easy for me to draw people in deplorable circumstances doing terrible things subject to abominable forces. But I dont want to just do that all the time; I dont want to heap another log onto the fire of Heres whats wrong with the human race. So I sidestep it by doing it with frogs.
DRE: Would you eat a frog or do you have too much respect for them?
JW: Oh Ive eaten them. Ill eat anything. Ive even eaten whale meat.
DRE: How is whale?
JW: Terrible, it tastes like liver.
DRE: Whered you have that?
JW: Japan.
DRE: Of course. They eat everything over there.
JW: Yeah they do. They have such a refined sense of barbarism. At the same dinner I had the whale, I had living fish, pregnant fish stuffed with eggs and liver torn pulsating from the bodies of crabs. I guess pain connected with the food makes it taste better.
DRE: Theyre okay with that over there.
JW: They love it. Its part of their exquisite sensibilities. I think its a good thing.
DRE: I spoke to Gary Panter when Jimbo in Purgatory came out. Something in both your guys work seems to connect more with people outside of America.
JW: I think that could be true.
DRE: As you said, you go over there and youll eat everything. Did you find that you have more in common with people that arent American?
JW: I dont have anything that I can determine in common with the Japanese. One of the reasons I like going there is because its such an alien experience for me. I never know what theyre thinking or what they want or why they do what they do. I enjoy being in Japan because theres a reason for me not to understand everything. Ive been to Europe a few times and I may identify with European sensibilities more than mainstream American ones. But I feel pretty at home here in Seattle. I feel like Im among people who are like me here.
DRE: Certainly you connect with Bill Frisell.
JW: Yeah, we do. It can be difficult to find someone far away with whom you have a common chemistry. I have a better chance of doing it here than I would in Idaho or somewhere.
DRE: How does this artwork fit in with Mysterio Simpatico?
JW: For that project Bill composed music and I did drawings. We discussed some ideas about where the stuff would go and I would go over to his house and listen to him compose some things on his guitar while I drew pictures accordingly. Then he would refine the music and I would refine the drawings. And I turned the music into some kind of filmstrip using that Ken Burns pan and scan approach. Three of the filmstrips were just images that were edited together via pans and fadeouts and truck-ins and truck-outs. Then three of them were pieces of flash animation using more sort of geometric, iconic shapes.
DRE: Did you know how it was going to come out?
JW: No, we didnt. It was a little bit of an experiment. We assumed that it would work simply because we have similar sensibilities about things, which is what the title refers to. So I didnt know exactly how well it would work, but I thought that it would work and I think it did. It was kind of a refined connoisseurs treat. I think that people who go to hear Bill improvise and rock out on guitar didnt get what they wanted and people who like to pore over drawings didnt get what they wanted. It existed somewhere between the two and for some people I know it worked really great. I know a number of people who really liked it or at least said they did. Then I know it was totally wasted on some other people. It was art, goddamnit. It was a big, high-faluting art project and if anybody didnt get it, they can go fuck themselves.
DRE: Were you into a lot of high-faluting people when you were growing up?
JW: No, as a matter of fact, I grew up in cultural isolation. My son has grown up knowing artists and writers just because theyve been around the house. But when I was growing up, I lived in a town that was so lily-white I didnt go to school with a black person any of the years I went to school, from kindergarten to high school. I lived in the whitest, the most sterile, most pampered place. It wasnt pampered like Beverly Hills or anything but it was this upper-middle class, cream of nowhere place. I didnt know anybody who was interested in anything intriguing or deep or mysterious or artistic or adventurous. It was just work at some job making money, come home, get drunk and have a barbeque. That was it. It was fucked. It was a terrible situation for me; I was beating my head against the wall all the time because I couldnt relate to anything.
DRE: How did you come to do art from that background?
JW: What happened was is that Ive always had this vision Ive wanted to express and Ive done that ever since I was able to focus from the age of 12 or 13 on. But I really had no idea what kind of career I would or could have as an artist. I didnt have the sophistication to plan to be a gallery artist or a cartoonist or illustrator; I just worked on trying to learn to draw and to express this vision. I was in my late 20s when I started self-publishing this thing called Jim, which was this illustrated, autojournal that dealt entirely with inferior issues that I had. I met Gary Groth through my friend Gil Kane and Gary offered to publish Jim if I would put some comics in it. Thats when I started drawing comics. Id always drawn cartoons, but I hadnt thought seriously about being a professional cartoonist because I had no idea to go about it. So once the opportunity was offered to me, thats what I did.
DRE: Is your stuff funny to you?
JW: Sometimes it is. Theres a drawing in Seeing Things called Crash, which shows a skeleton in an airplane about to crash into a great, big, pompous-looking toad. I remember when I drew that; my wife and I laughed ourselves sick over it. We thought it was an absolutely hilarious image. So under those circumstances, yeah I thought that was funny. Unfortunately, I drew that thing on September 9th, 2001. Theres a local tabloid here in Seattle called The Stranger. It used to run my drawings in the back with the ads where nobody would see them. That drawing was slated to run that week and then 9/11 happened two days after I did the drawing. It looked like that drawing referred to 9/11 with the airplanes crashing into things and the skeletons, so I had them pull it. I was afraid if it was printed, it would look like I was making fun of it or something. I came to look at that cartoon with a certain loathing but before that event I thought it was hilariously funny. There are other drawings in that book that I think are really, really terrifying. Theres a drawing called The Holy Land in there, that just upset me when I was doing it because it so perfectly expressed some profound art-related fears that I had. Then theres a drawing called Good Standing that I was laughing all the time I was drawing and I thought it was funny.
DRE: Youve been working with Fantagraphics for so long and they really seem to treat you and your work with the respect it totally deserves. Are you able to feel artistically satisfied with the work you do?
JW: Oh sometimes. There are fleeting moments of satisfaction but those are short-lived. I generally feel spurred on by anxiety and a sense that I hadnt achieved anything. I used to have this really infantile attitude that one day I would create a picture that was so good that would absolve me from all human responsibilities. I always thought that if you were a really great artist or a cartoonist that you didnt have to worry about anything anymore. You could knock on any door and say, Im Jack Davis and Im hungry and I need a place to sleep and theyd go, Jack Davis! Come in. Or that the government would say, I was looking at Jack Davis income tax return. Hes not doing that well, I think we ought to lower his taxes. I just had this feeling that if you were a success as an artist that your future would be made. I dont know why I thought that, like I said, its an infantile notion. But that feeling took a long time to fade out. It took me a long time to grasp the fact that people can do work thats as good as they can possibly do and still end in squalor and despair.
DRE: But thats not going to happen to you.
JW: Oh, you think not?
DRE: I hope not.
JW: It very well could.
DRE: Do you still do stuff for The Stranger?
JW: Im through with The Stranger. The new art director fired me in a way that pissed me off, so I dont think Ill ever do anything for them again.
DRE: What happened?
JW: He calls me up and goes Ive got good news and bad news. The good news is, I still like your work and want to use it from time to time. The bad news is that we wont be needing your cartoons anymore. I was giving these people the very cream of what I had to offer for a mere 50 bucks a week. They decided that they didnt need my cartoon anymore. I was so irritated so I think Im through with them.
DRE: What other commercial work are you doing?
JW: Right now Im painting a poster with an owl in it for some water conservation group. But I dont do that much commercial work, really. I just did a CD cover for a friend to put out a band, but I didnt get paid anything, so I guess it wasnt really commercial. I just did the image thats going to go on the cover of this big Ramones box set that Rhino is putting out. Its called Weird Tales of The Ramones.
DRE: Years ago I visited Barry Windsor-Smiths house and I expected to see great suits of armor and things like that but it wasnt like that at all. What kind of artwork do you have in your house?
JW: I have some golden age Dutch painting reproductions like a Vermeer and a Rembrandt. I have some cartoon artwork like the original art for Why I Hate Christians by Dan Clowes hanging up. Also Ive got a bunch of medical models and scientific equipment. Ive got a giant statue showing a frogs nervous system. I have some luminous discharge tubes, other scientific equipment and stuff like that.
DRE: Thats bizarre.
JW: Yeah, theres not that much of it and its a great, big house so its kind of spread thin.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy Seeing Things
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Jim Woodring: Today, Im painting covers and doing designs for these cardboard boxes that these Japanese Frank toys are going to come in. I designed it, but this company Presspop built these plastic Frank figures. Theyre actually kind of big at about eight inches tall. His two companion accomplices are with him and theyre in these boxes Im designing and they should be sold this year.
DRE: Are they a limited edition type thing?
JW: No, its not limited edition. Although I dont know what theyre going to cost. It might turn out to be a limited edition simply by virtue of being overpriced. Theyre just toys; little articulated figures that come in a box and Im trying to package them as enticingly as possible. The tops of the boxes are going to be watercolor vignettes showing the characters and then there will be a label on the sides. I hope it works out. Im in the early planning stages so Im not entirely sure Im on the right track, but I hope so.
DRE: Since the new book is called Seeing Things. Does that mean, this is how you see the world?
JW: In some ways it is how I see the world. At least some aspects of it. I guess its more a reflection of how I would see the world if I could see the things Im thinking about.
DRE: Do you want to see the things youre thinking about?
JW: I dont really have a choice. I could jettison my perspective and try to be a more normal person, but I dont think Id succeed at that. I think Id just be empty. I dont think I could replace it with something more conventional. Thats not an option for me.
DRE: When you look at a frog, do you see it as the way you later draw would draw it? Or is it later when you go, Its time for me to draw that the frogs come out that way?
JW: Well, if you notice there are no human beings in that book. I tend to use frogs as stand-ins for human beings, because when it comes drawing people for symbolic pictures, I never quite know how to go about doing it. If you draw them so that theyre like portraits, then the picture becomes about that personality. But if you just draw placeholders the figures tend to be very minimalist. They dont have a lot of personality. Its hard for me to know how to draw people, so I draw frogs because to me theyre kind of stripped-down versions of human beings.
DRE: What do you see in frogs that others dont?
JW: Ive always been fascinated by frogs and Ive always loved to look at them. Theyre good food for thought. I guess in France theyre just good food. They have a lot of interesting attributes. If you have a spiritual event; theyre amazing because theyll just sit still as if theyre meditating for a long period of time, but theyre never out of it. They always notice when a shadow approaches and then they move like greased lightning. They live on the land and in the water. That amphibious quality is something you can compare to the way people live in both the animal and the spiritual world. Theyre strangely anthropomorphic. They almost seem to have hands. They have faces you can read expressions in more readily than you can read them on the faces of other animals. I dont know what it is but theyre easier to figure out than people. I guess the reason why I dont draw people very much is because I dont understand them. I dont understand us so I never quite know what to show. Its easy for me to draw people in deplorable circumstances doing terrible things subject to abominable forces. But I dont want to just do that all the time; I dont want to heap another log onto the fire of Heres whats wrong with the human race. So I sidestep it by doing it with frogs.
DRE: Would you eat a frog or do you have too much respect for them?
JW: Oh Ive eaten them. Ill eat anything. Ive even eaten whale meat.
DRE: How is whale?
JW: Terrible, it tastes like liver.
DRE: Whered you have that?
JW: Japan.
DRE: Of course. They eat everything over there.
JW: Yeah they do. They have such a refined sense of barbarism. At the same dinner I had the whale, I had living fish, pregnant fish stuffed with eggs and liver torn pulsating from the bodies of crabs. I guess pain connected with the food makes it taste better.
DRE: Theyre okay with that over there.
JW: They love it. Its part of their exquisite sensibilities. I think its a good thing.
DRE: I spoke to Gary Panter when Jimbo in Purgatory came out. Something in both your guys work seems to connect more with people outside of America.
JW: I think that could be true.
DRE: As you said, you go over there and youll eat everything. Did you find that you have more in common with people that arent American?
JW: I dont have anything that I can determine in common with the Japanese. One of the reasons I like going there is because its such an alien experience for me. I never know what theyre thinking or what they want or why they do what they do. I enjoy being in Japan because theres a reason for me not to understand everything. Ive been to Europe a few times and I may identify with European sensibilities more than mainstream American ones. But I feel pretty at home here in Seattle. I feel like Im among people who are like me here.
DRE: Certainly you connect with Bill Frisell.
JW: Yeah, we do. It can be difficult to find someone far away with whom you have a common chemistry. I have a better chance of doing it here than I would in Idaho or somewhere.
DRE: How does this artwork fit in with Mysterio Simpatico?
JW: For that project Bill composed music and I did drawings. We discussed some ideas about where the stuff would go and I would go over to his house and listen to him compose some things on his guitar while I drew pictures accordingly. Then he would refine the music and I would refine the drawings. And I turned the music into some kind of filmstrip using that Ken Burns pan and scan approach. Three of the filmstrips were just images that were edited together via pans and fadeouts and truck-ins and truck-outs. Then three of them were pieces of flash animation using more sort of geometric, iconic shapes.
DRE: Did you know how it was going to come out?
JW: No, we didnt. It was a little bit of an experiment. We assumed that it would work simply because we have similar sensibilities about things, which is what the title refers to. So I didnt know exactly how well it would work, but I thought that it would work and I think it did. It was kind of a refined connoisseurs treat. I think that people who go to hear Bill improvise and rock out on guitar didnt get what they wanted and people who like to pore over drawings didnt get what they wanted. It existed somewhere between the two and for some people I know it worked really great. I know a number of people who really liked it or at least said they did. Then I know it was totally wasted on some other people. It was art, goddamnit. It was a big, high-faluting art project and if anybody didnt get it, they can go fuck themselves.
DRE: Were you into a lot of high-faluting people when you were growing up?
JW: No, as a matter of fact, I grew up in cultural isolation. My son has grown up knowing artists and writers just because theyve been around the house. But when I was growing up, I lived in a town that was so lily-white I didnt go to school with a black person any of the years I went to school, from kindergarten to high school. I lived in the whitest, the most sterile, most pampered place. It wasnt pampered like Beverly Hills or anything but it was this upper-middle class, cream of nowhere place. I didnt know anybody who was interested in anything intriguing or deep or mysterious or artistic or adventurous. It was just work at some job making money, come home, get drunk and have a barbeque. That was it. It was fucked. It was a terrible situation for me; I was beating my head against the wall all the time because I couldnt relate to anything.
DRE: How did you come to do art from that background?
JW: What happened was is that Ive always had this vision Ive wanted to express and Ive done that ever since I was able to focus from the age of 12 or 13 on. But I really had no idea what kind of career I would or could have as an artist. I didnt have the sophistication to plan to be a gallery artist or a cartoonist or illustrator; I just worked on trying to learn to draw and to express this vision. I was in my late 20s when I started self-publishing this thing called Jim, which was this illustrated, autojournal that dealt entirely with inferior issues that I had. I met Gary Groth through my friend Gil Kane and Gary offered to publish Jim if I would put some comics in it. Thats when I started drawing comics. Id always drawn cartoons, but I hadnt thought seriously about being a professional cartoonist because I had no idea to go about it. So once the opportunity was offered to me, thats what I did.
DRE: Is your stuff funny to you?
JW: Sometimes it is. Theres a drawing in Seeing Things called Crash, which shows a skeleton in an airplane about to crash into a great, big, pompous-looking toad. I remember when I drew that; my wife and I laughed ourselves sick over it. We thought it was an absolutely hilarious image. So under those circumstances, yeah I thought that was funny. Unfortunately, I drew that thing on September 9th, 2001. Theres a local tabloid here in Seattle called The Stranger. It used to run my drawings in the back with the ads where nobody would see them. That drawing was slated to run that week and then 9/11 happened two days after I did the drawing. It looked like that drawing referred to 9/11 with the airplanes crashing into things and the skeletons, so I had them pull it. I was afraid if it was printed, it would look like I was making fun of it or something. I came to look at that cartoon with a certain loathing but before that event I thought it was hilariously funny. There are other drawings in that book that I think are really, really terrifying. Theres a drawing called The Holy Land in there, that just upset me when I was doing it because it so perfectly expressed some profound art-related fears that I had. Then theres a drawing called Good Standing that I was laughing all the time I was drawing and I thought it was funny.
DRE: Youve been working with Fantagraphics for so long and they really seem to treat you and your work with the respect it totally deserves. Are you able to feel artistically satisfied with the work you do?
JW: Oh sometimes. There are fleeting moments of satisfaction but those are short-lived. I generally feel spurred on by anxiety and a sense that I hadnt achieved anything. I used to have this really infantile attitude that one day I would create a picture that was so good that would absolve me from all human responsibilities. I always thought that if you were a really great artist or a cartoonist that you didnt have to worry about anything anymore. You could knock on any door and say, Im Jack Davis and Im hungry and I need a place to sleep and theyd go, Jack Davis! Come in. Or that the government would say, I was looking at Jack Davis income tax return. Hes not doing that well, I think we ought to lower his taxes. I just had this feeling that if you were a success as an artist that your future would be made. I dont know why I thought that, like I said, its an infantile notion. But that feeling took a long time to fade out. It took me a long time to grasp the fact that people can do work thats as good as they can possibly do and still end in squalor and despair.
DRE: But thats not going to happen to you.
JW: Oh, you think not?
DRE: I hope not.
JW: It very well could.
DRE: Do you still do stuff for The Stranger?
JW: Im through with The Stranger. The new art director fired me in a way that pissed me off, so I dont think Ill ever do anything for them again.
DRE: What happened?
JW: He calls me up and goes Ive got good news and bad news. The good news is, I still like your work and want to use it from time to time. The bad news is that we wont be needing your cartoons anymore. I was giving these people the very cream of what I had to offer for a mere 50 bucks a week. They decided that they didnt need my cartoon anymore. I was so irritated so I think Im through with them.
DRE: What other commercial work are you doing?
JW: Right now Im painting a poster with an owl in it for some water conservation group. But I dont do that much commercial work, really. I just did a CD cover for a friend to put out a band, but I didnt get paid anything, so I guess it wasnt really commercial. I just did the image thats going to go on the cover of this big Ramones box set that Rhino is putting out. Its called Weird Tales of The Ramones.
DRE: Years ago I visited Barry Windsor-Smiths house and I expected to see great suits of armor and things like that but it wasnt like that at all. What kind of artwork do you have in your house?
JW: I have some golden age Dutch painting reproductions like a Vermeer and a Rembrandt. I have some cartoon artwork like the original art for Why I Hate Christians by Dan Clowes hanging up. Also Ive got a bunch of medical models and scientific equipment. Ive got a giant statue showing a frogs nervous system. I have some luminous discharge tubes, other scientific equipment and stuff like that.
DRE: Thats bizarre.
JW: Yeah, theres not that much of it and its a great, big house so its kind of spread thin.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
Woodring is a big inspiration to me. I love his work and his art. It's transcendental.