Down the Rabbbit Hole With Pop Art Icon Ron English

Ron English joined Whitney Moore for our Tower Livestream to talk about his myriad of projects and surviving COVID. English’s work has so permeated counter-culture and pop culture that you’re bound to recognize his designs and murals, as well as his personal brand and company “PoPaganda”. He has been a major force in Street Art for some time, but has also worked widely in album art, and is someone who tours with his band, The Rabbbits, though they are currently grounded from their tour by quarantine.

English was coming to us as a COVID survivor to share his experiences with us. He assumes “We’ll all have it by the time the year’s over”, he laughed. We can all stay inside for a year and a half and wait for the vaccine, but that’s unlikely. He was sure he would get COVID, since a couple weeks before quarantine he was at a big party in Spain, then he was in New York at some big events. And he knew it wasn’t a great idea, but they wanted to support the events.

So, he got it. It’s different for everyone, but he hasn’t fully recovered, and still has painful lungs. He has a “harsh lifestyle” spray painting large surfaces, and he might have to move away from aerosols for a while until he can recover. Now, he has to get through quarantine itself, which isn’t too bad because his art studio is in the same house. He’s been in the house for two months, trying to do all the things on his back list. He has a world called “Delusionville” in his imagination, and by this time next year he’ll be able to put a coffee table book out about it. Previously, he did not have a single day to work on it in the whole year ahead, his calendar was so booked up. Now he’s far along on creating it.

Moore asked how English stays so motivated in quarantine. He’s never had a work or creative block before, English confessed. He has about 200 books full of sketches and ideas, which he could use if he did wake up lacking in ideas, but he doesn’t quite comprehend how one could lack ideas.

English’s band, The Rabbbits, had just tracked their new record before quarantine, so they were lucky. They still had to mix and master, but that can be done in separate rooms by different people far apart. The new album is a rock opera featuring his characters, including the very first one he created, which was released through Tower Records long ago, Ronnie Rabbbit. The vinyls sold very well even though the character was unknown, which was surprising to him at the time. The band features all the characters English is known for and now we can hear them and their stories on the album when it releases next week.

A bunch of different artists play the different characters on the album, so tracking was difficult, having to bring all the singers in. It was a remarkable thing to get it done at all, much less before quarantine. Now their 40-some tour dates to play around the country aren’t happening. Whereas a lot of bands are holding back their records which would have dropped during this time, to coincide with later touring, English is releasing his record next week.

His band were previously the back-up band for Steely Dan and Bob Dylan, and when those folks  are not on the road, they help him make these records. Sam Smith helped him put together an actual tour for The Rabbbits, and they were very excited, but now with no tour, they are at least excited about the record itself.

Has English been up to any Livestreams or animated specials? Because he’s been locked in the studio, he’s started making videos for all these songs on the new album. He’s been building the world out that way. Those videos are going to be released on English’s Youtube channel and many are a mixture of stop motion and other methods.

Maybe The Rabbbits will do one of those drive in shows! English has a store down the street that’s closed, but they could do a pop up concert there, he said, and he is also planning a pop up art show that’s drive through.

English has a whole documentary in the can, too, and someone is editing it at the moment. He wishes it was ready to release already. It was shot over a five year period, but only wrapped up recently. It was supposed to end with English in China, but that’s not happening now. It’ll need a new ending, maybe just with him, in his room, like everyone else right now.

Is his life actually different now, though? In recent years, he’s had many, many opportunities to travel and be booked for work and appearances. But if you’re never back home in the studio, you’ll run out of art, he warned. He’s wanted for a long time to be able to stay home in Beacon, New York, and get to work on his art for a year, uninterrupted, and he may have gotten his “dream”, he said.

English and his son made a film called Beacon Big Foot, as seen on their Youtube channel. The people who he produces toys with, Pop Life, have a movie studio, and are producing a number of movies. So, they let English make an appearance in the movies.

Does he have bucket list items in the film industry? He likes making cameos, but he’s no actor. Once he was at a signing at a big convention, having signed for 6 hours, then was grabbed for his cameo in a movie. He was told to paint in the background, but then learn 15 lines for the role, all after working all day. He doubts he could pull himself together for a full movie after that experience.

English, of course, does a lot of music poster art, having worked with Slash, Linkin Park, The Dandy Warhols, and many more, and he’s also made some toys with bands. He takes an interest in collaborating, he said.

Are there any film directors he’d like to work with? Richard Linklater makes the “perfect” movies for English. He met him back in college, during a time when he was doing billboards. English met Linklater at a party and introduced himself, and didn’t get much of a reaction. When Linklater realized that English was the person who had been doing the billboards, though, he did definitely want to talk. English prefers movies that are about people, rather than those that are full of “death and destruction”.

Before Linklater made his film, Slacker, English used to watch people coming and going from a local gas station, noticing connections between them, in ways that later turned up in Linklater’s films, showing how sympatico they are. English also likes directors who use the same actors from time to time. Lately, the show Schitts Creek also appeals to him.

Some people are probably going to be making movies not even leaving the house right now, “not leaning on special effects or anything”, English predicts. He used to get photography assignments where they had to do projects without leaving their room. It “helps you grow creatively” to be challenged like that, English feels.

He also thinks it would be nice, when film festivals are held again, for extra days to be added to spotlight films that got lost in quarantine.

Moore wondered, is quarantine going to help us make better art, or cause worse art? English thinks we’ll be getting better. Once you’re on “the treadmill” of projects, you don’t get to be “thoughtful” anymore, he feels. But now you can be. Now English can track down a band he likes, and search out everything they have released, in ways he never could before.

What sort of music is on his mind these days, or while he’s painting? Surprisingly, up until now, English has never listened to music while painting, previously listening to talk radio to educate himself about politics. Bands he’s really gotten into include the Dandy Warhols and the music he makes is the music he’s always wanted to hear. One of the “nice things about being relatively known is that people take your calls”, he said, so that if you’re a fan of a musician, you can call them up and ask, “Would you like to write a song together?” And maybe they will.

He’s just started talking to Jack Black, who he’s recently met, but he hasn’t broached the subject of working together yet. English’s music is “super funny” and crosses genres, like Black’s does.

Vinyl toys are one of English’s major mediums, and he’s extremely well known in that field. Asked what he thinks the appeal of vinyl toys might be, he said, “People like art”. Paintings might take a lot of time, and being a painter doesn’t always pay well. So, vinyl art is different in that it’s affordable, but might retain its value over time, and can even be sold later if needed. The art world is weird right now, booming because people are looking for a “stable place to put their money”, English observed.

The Ronnie Rabbbit vinyl figure is rare now, but sold 7000 back in the day before Tower Records closed. Now, a lot of his toys are “open-ended” and not necessarily limited edition, and he can make as many as he wants. He also does limited editions of 100 that are a particular color, and those can go up in value a lot. Collecting art can be an investment, and vinyl figures could be a way to “test the waters”, Moore observed.

English has recently started releasing masks through Threadless for the quarantine. As soon as quarantine started, he got a call from a cousin who is a head nurse at a hospital in Texas, saying that they didn’t have enough masks and asking if he and his wife could help make some. She sent English and his wife a template to make masks, and his wife was soon cutting up all his clothing line, making 400 masks by hand to donate. When Threadless called them, they were quite relieved. Threadless has a “buy one, they donate one”, rule. It was a very helpful partnership to take the burden off them for physically making the masks, and now people who want his art on their masks can get it, too.

Moore wondered if Ron English’s masks are going to become collector’s items. A lot of artists, sports teams, and more are getting into this production process. English said he wouldn’t be surprised that there might be an art show in ten years called “The Masks of the Pandemic” because it would show how people have adapted.

The idea that the way to be heroic by staying home is interesting to English, since traditional heroic ideas are so different. It’s so “opposite” and doesn’t feel heroic, but the masks allow people to have fun with this situation. “If we are going to do this, let’s be artists about it.”, he said.

There’s often a cultural phenomenon that “anchors” people together, like a Batman lunchbox, which extends to a shared cultural experience of a TV show and other media. And those objects later have value. So, these masks may end up having them too.

Nostalgia is so big right now during the pandemic, Moore commented, even bigger than before. English thinks people have “always been into nostalgia”. He used to skip high school all the time, thinking, “I’ll never be this young again.” And valuing that time actually turned out to be true. He still remembers those experiences and is aware, “I’ll never feel that good again.” He’d find basic toys back then and he’d think then, “someone made this thing”, but you can’t find them now. To hold one in his hand again, he’d “pay a premium”.

If he could only pick one art medium to pursue for the rest of his life, what would it be? His “central practice” is paint, so he’d be satisfied with that. English thinks pop culture is about expressing “what it feels like to live in a certain time”, and maybe his art is a way of telling people that. It’s life “channeled through” his brain and “morphed and twisted”.

Visualizing comes easy for him, but he “can’t visualize people who can’t visualize things”. Maybe they can’t, though? He’s not sure. Most people, when asked to draw basic things, like a bicycle, can’t do it correctly, though. Your mind changes and “compresses” things, like your imagined version of your hometown. It gets smaller in your mind, he thinks, and if you visit, you realize it’s larger. Your mind will also “take things that are similar” and put them together into “one event”. “Your brain naturally edits, and puts things together, and makes them your own.”, English said.

English had an experience once at college, when describing a person to a policeman, where he realized that he and his friend described the colors of the person’s clothing totally differently. At the time, he was taking photos in negative all the time for a project, and in his mind, he was always “flipping colors”, so that happened to him in real life too. His mind switched his memory of looking at a person’s clothing.

English has worked with Dark Horse Comics before, and they released his toys. He’s done a couple of comics over the years, such as a back story for MC Supersized, with a history for him. Some of these characters are extremely famous, so why not give them a backstory? Comics take a long time, though. English created one for Heavy Metal Magazine in 2019, and he curated the Street Art issue (#296). At the time, a lot of the artists were calling him up saying, “I hate you” because it took so long and was so hard to make comics. And he had encouraged them to try it. “It’s a difficult medium.”, English says. If he did make comics again, he’d probably work with other writers and artists, but he’d want to keep control over things.

In the Street Art Special, we get lots of interesting tales from Street Artists told through the comics medium. Many are fanciful, too, English said, and on the whole, it let artists show more than the tip of the iceberg of their creative ideas.

Does he have any favorite artists? Over the years he was part of the “low brow” scene and followed people like Anthony Ausgang, Camille Rose Garcia, Mark Ryden. Of course, among Street Artists, there’s Banksy and Shepard Fairey. He’s been lucky to be a “seminal” part of very big art movements and get to be friends with many of these people, he said.

When English moved to New York, he was in grad school, and rented an apartment in Soho. His sister went there ahead of him, so by the time he got there, she was friends with Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring, and he got to “fall into” that group right away.

Once, he painted a huge mural on a construction wall in Soho and Basquiat came and painted over it. The wall was 11 by 22 foot, with Ron English and Basquiat’s work on it. It would be worth so much money now! But he didn’t have the “foresight” to go and take it down then. It’s hard to think about these things as “history as they are happening”, he reflected.

Does he have any art he wishes he could track down now, Moore asked. English had a friend in art school, Bill Leisner, who had a rig that was essentially a selfie rig that he then used to take photos that way. He said people behaved differently when you were in the picture with them. Leisner recently “unearthed” photos from a specific two week period of their youth in New York and it’s surprising to see them now, taking English back to these strange days in his life. So much craziness! What a weird “time-capsule” has been preserved in those two weeks of his life. Bill Leisner is scanning them and starting to post them. Trying to recall who all the people in the photos are is a trip for English. One of those people became a landscape artist who creates images that can be seen from space, but everyone was “just kids then”.

English then showed us around his fabulous studio, including shelves of all the toys he makes. How does he plan to display all the items? When they first moved to the house, they built bookshelves because they had thousands of books, but slowly the shelves got filled with art. English has two more stories of his house full of toys, he warned, and also a warehouse full. His “sets” for filming are in the basement, and he showed us a number of backgrounds and set ups.

How does he keep track of where all this stuff is, though? English says he just knows. Everything that sells gets well recorded by his wife, who is a librarian, and that helps keep people from making fakes. If artists aren’t very professional, and rip off his work with fakes, it causes a lot of problems. But if you keep good archives, it’s much harder to do that, English explained. In China, for instance, they even have tracking devices to help prevent fake collectibles. They keep records of the trail back to the artists studios.

English works on multiple projects at a time, and “flits” around between them. It’s easier not to get bored that way. There’s plenty that “needs to get done”. Because he doesn’t have to do the same thing every day, life stays varied.

While English is locked in his house, he can still keep creating, so that makes it an efficient process. Making a record, however, is more difficult, and can’t be done that way. Making an animation would be a big production which he couldn’t do by himself. He has a crew working on a VR version of his world, but it will be 7 years before it’s out. If only they had it out now! Then people could go “down the rabbit hole into Delusionville”, since it’s a fun place to exist, he assured us.

What about our beloved Tower motto, No Music, No Life/Know Music, Know Life? English said that his parents hated music. When he made his first record, he was so excited, and ran home to play it, but his parents didn’t really want to hear it. He had to get a stereo out of the garage before he realized that they really didn’t want to offend him, but they just didn’t like music. It was simply “noise” to them.

Check out The Rabbbits this Friday when it’s out!