nicole_powers

Down The Rabbit Hole With Camille Rose Garcia

SuicideGirls caught up with artist Camille Rose Garcia at the opening of Down The Rabbit Hole, an exhibition of the original art from her latest project, a reimagining of the illustrations that accompany the text of Lewis Carroll's classic children's book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Though the March Hare, the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse were unable to attend the party at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles on Saturday night in person, Hollywood funnyman Robin Williams did make a somewhat unexpected appearance. Curiouser and curiouser, it transpired that Williams, who was kind enough to pose for the photo with Garcia above, is a huge fan of SuicideGirls. "We love the SuicideGirls," said an enthusiastic Williams, before posing for the snap.

Earlier, we'd spoken with Garcia for an in-depth Q&A which can be found in our interview section. After talking about the visual vocabulary and inspirations behind her Alice illustrations, our conversation turned to a core SG topic: body art. Below is an outtake from this interview in which Garcia talks about her own tattoos and her art as it appears on other people's body parts.

Nicole Powers: I notice on your website you encourage people to use your art as inspiration for their tattoos. All you ask is that people send in snaps for your tattoo gallery. What kind of photos have people sent in?

Camille Rose Garcia: I've seen a lot of really great ones. It's pretty cool seeing other people's interpretations. I think some of it maybe is the scale thing. Like I made this painting one time that I think was about three feet by six feet and [a woman] had it tattooed on the back of her calf - the whole painting. I thought, "Wow, that's amazing that it even looks good." But it did. It looked really cool.

One guy got both full sleeves of a mixture of my work, and I thought, "That's really cool. That's really dedicated." It's always really exciting and fun to see what people come up with because they'll mix the pieces up and rearrange them, which is sort of like a William Burroughs cut-up style.

NP: Tell me about your body art.

CRG: I need to get some more because I don't have nearly as much as one would think I would have.

NP: Who gets to do art on an artist?

CRG: That's the thing. I have one that I got, and I guess the guy was so nervous because he knew of my work and what I did. So he was nervous, and then I'd sit there and be like, "Oh, maybe I don't want that much color," like micromanaging everything about the color. Next time I just have to let someone do what they're going to do and not even look. I'll probably have a shoulder piece done so I can't watch. This was on my arm so I could site there and watch, which is not a good idea.

NP: If you're allowing someone to put their art on your body, then you have to surrender at some point to their vision.

CRG: That's why I don't have that much yet. Because that's the difficult part. They'd have to be an artist that I admire I guess to have it done.

NP: Do you have any ideas of what you'd like next?

CRG: Well my first idea was that I'd like I wanted to have both of my arms be all different birds, kind of thematically all from nature. But now I've been re-watching some of the old cartoons that I really like, the early Max Fleischer, Betty Boop, Koko the Clown. I was thinking maybe a montage of some of my early inspirations from when I was a kid, but I don't know how those would work together. This is the problem too. I sort of like over-think the whole theme of the whole project.

NP: Over-conceptualize?

CRG: Yes. I over-conceptualize how it will all work together.

NP: You need to just get drunk and throw a dart at a tattoo shop wall and go with a design picked that way.

CRG: I know. That's what I need to do, somewhere really bad like New Jersey. I'll get a Tasmanian Devil.

NP: An exercise in deconceptualization.

CRG: Yes, releasing the control.


Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, featuring the illustrations of Camille Rose Garcia, is available from Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. For more info go to CamilleRoseGarcia.com/