PodgyPanda Creates Art That Makes You LOL

Gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, nostalgic, arousing, anger-inducing… these are some of the common impressions that artists often seek to evoke through their art. This intentional pulling of heartstrings is either accomplished by means of cognitive antecedents or clear messaging through powerful imagery. It is often argued by art critics that good art isn’t just a pretty picture; moreover, it makes the viewer feel some kind of way. But Richard Kuoch, known in the art world as PodgyPanda, just wants to make you smile. Maybe even chortle or LOL.

In his first ever solo show in the United States, Kuoch is revealing his newest digital illustration series at Dragatomi in Midtown Sacramento. The series places his cute little characters, familiar to fans of his previous works, into recognizable Disney movie scenes. In one of these pieces, his panda character replaces Ariel as the mermaid bursting out of the foamy ocean and onto a rock while in song. In another, the panda as Tramp shares a single strand of spaghetti with Lady in Little Italy. Another illustration depicts PodgyPanda as Simba from The Lion King being held up by a baboon character over Pride Rock in the iconic birth announcement. You get the idea.

The effect is like being bombarded by adorableness and humor, although people who like to read into things could probably extrapolate some meaning in the theme in regards to pop culture, icons, blah, blah, blah. Kuoch says he just wants the viewer to feel happy. Beyond his little dudes’ unabashed cuteness, his use of cartoonishly vibrant colors also lends to the visually pleasing and uplifting result of looking at his pieces.

A New Zealand native, Kuoch just moved back home to Auckland after a two-year stint in London. While in England, he was lucky enough to land a job at Kidrobot, the famous adult toy company (not that kind of adult toy—the collectible, endearing figurine sort) and was able to bolster his art career to new heights. He has shown his work in the United States in group shows, as well as in Canada, New Zealand and Europe. His first solo show was in Calgary.

The solo show at Dragatomi opens on Second Saturday, Aug. 9, and will be coming down on Sept. 12, 2014. If you’ve never popped into Dragatomi before (it’s on J Street between 23rd and 24th streets), it serves as the perfect venue for this show. Dragatomi is a gallery and boutique that features toys, apparel, art books, and art inspired by urban pop culture—PodgyPanda fits right in.

Besides his popular digital illustrations, Kuoch also creates logos, drawings on wood or paper, resin toys, and apparel. His updated website launch (Podgypanda.com) is slated to correspond with the solo exhibit at Dragatomi, and his online shop is bustling, though Kuoch says it usually experiences a spike in sales following a show. Exhibit attendees can also purchase his work in person at shows—Kuoch likes to attend his shows so he can meet the people who come to them.

With a background in animation, Kuoch’s cheerful imagination led to the birth of the characters that are depicted in a unique world throughout his work. PodgyPanda is sort of the main character, with a cast of supporting pals. The characters are adorable little chaps in odd situations or locations that support his overall motto about art—“Blink, smile, share.” His father influenced his outlook by being a funny guy that loved to make people laugh, and for Kuoch, making art is all about the importance and contagiousness of happiness.

In addition to sharing his art on his website and at exhibitions, PodgyPanda is all up in the social media, too—Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Twitter—and Kuoch has participated in Creative Mornings in Auckland, a breakfast lecture series for the creative community which takes place in cities around the world. These rad and inspiring themed talks are available to view online at Creativemornings.com.

“’Blink, smile, share’ refers to an emotion, what I want people to get out of experiencing my art. I try to evoke some sort of feeling, mostly a happy thought worthy of sharing,” explains Kuoch, who hopes to see your smiling face at Dragatomi.

Kuoch’s solo show featuring PodgyPanda will be at Dragatomi, 2317 J Street, from Aug. 9 to Sept. 6, 2014. For more info, visit Podgypanda.com or Dragatomi.com.

Society through the Eyes of Jacqueline Gallagher

Jacqueline Gallagher wants to be taken seriously as an artist—just don’t take her art too seriously.

Gallagher sees the gorgeous and the grotesque in humanity, finds the comic relief and intricately recreates it in her oil paintings and drawings.

The centerpiece for her upcoming Sacramento solo show, Satirical Saturation, is a Fiji “Octomaid”—half a woman stitched to half a floppy, twisting tentacled creature.

The segments’ details—human and octopus—sag and ooze realistically in purple and fleshy pink and a sleepy monkey completes the image.

“There’s a sexual element to it, too, that brings up the idea of fetishism and objectivity,” Gallagher says. “I post my work on various forums online for critique, and my favorite comment so far was on this piece. It was, ‘Pretty cool, I wish she was hotter but whatever.’”

Mythological characters influence her latest collection, specifically satyrs, Medusa, other gorgons and classic demons.

“The way I see it, people really haven’t changed much,” she says. “We’re still just as vain, overindulgent, self-interested, and decadent, and these characters, with their protruding horns and snakes, represent those very human traits.”

The show works off some of her previous paintings and exhibits, which have included candy-colored mermaids smoking with monkeys and deathly women covered in bugs but growing unicorn horns.

Earlier influences spring from her childhood in Hawaii, where Gallagher still resides. The islands still have a place in her work, which often portrays oceanic or jungle creatures. Or her house cats. What tourists might consider inspiration, however, Gallagher considered somewhat of a chokehold.

“When I first started painting, everything was very Hawaii-oriented—ocean landscapes and flowers and all that and that’s what I started out painting because that’s all I saw,” Gallagher says. “In college, I started looking at work from out of the islands and got more inspired. I don’t know, it was actually kind of limiting growing up in Hawaii.”

Gallagher also worked in the commercial art business, and the kinds of customers she encountered sometimes ended up as inspiration for the flawed human condition represented in her work.

Japanese art, cartoons and anime also influenced her style as a kid, leading her to experiment exaggeration with bright colors and shapes.

“What’s funny is I try to make the paintings a little dark, since I’m really interested in opposition and mixing something really pretty with something really grotesque and slimy, but sometimes people don’t always get the humor,” Gallagher says. “I’ve seen some horror art and this is not even close.”

It’s been five years since Gallagher launched a website and started touring nationally with her work, exhibiting in San Francisco, Sacramento and Brooklyn galleries specializing in pop culture, macabre and surrealism.

Over that time period, the 30-year-old has gained a strong fan base, which she credits to social media and Creep Machine Magazine, an online publication currently being reworked.

“I talked to this guy online, Joshua G., from Creep Machine, and he was really encouraging and he had me participate in a San Francisco show and got my website started too,” she says. “He just looked for art online and found me. That helped me jump off and get me on your coast there. It’s all social media that’s made it possible, really.”

Joshua had been scouring sites likes Deviantart.com when he stumbled upon Gallagher’s work and wanted to share and provide an interview for Creep Machine.

“The first painting I saw of Jackie’s was A Well Trimmed Bush,” he says, referencing a painting of a smoking woman in a lace dress with ghostly eyes and an equally ghostly-eyed cat.

“I loved the classic feel the painting had, the pose, and the attention to detail as seen in the drapery, lace, and skin tones,” Joshua says. “It’s a beautiful painting, but there is also a vibe of creepiness to it that draws you in, makes you want to see what else this artist has created.”

The web designer/art supporter says artists face economic challenges today that have made it harder to live off their work, and he feels it’s partly because the public consumes art differently.

“So much art is consumed digitally now, and I think people need to remember that most of the time the work of art they are looking at, and sharing on social media, exists and might even be for sale,” he says. “Owning art is seen as a luxury to many people, but it is possible and can nurture and support the artists when people do buy the work. With that said, I think that darker forms of art are gaining in popularity. There are of course darker works that tend to be too much for people to buy and hang in their houses, but Jackie has done a great job of creating ‘dark’ works of art, that are also enticing.”

Joshua notes artists like Caravaggio and Francisco Goya (with his Disasters of War series), as well as Black Paintings from the 1800s as great examples of classical “dark art.” He says today’s movement takes more of a nod from pop culture trends.

“When you really dig deep you see that there is some amazing and beautiful works of art that are not created simply for the sake of being dark/shocking, but are telling stories, commenting on social and cultural issues, and in many ways helping the artists that create the imagery to deal with what they see around them,” he says.

Gallagher has successfully used social media and her website as storefronts for her artistic commentary, and currently lives off of her creations.

“It’s a really good time to be an artist right now because of social media,” she says. “It’s a good way for them to show off their work and a platform to meet other artists. It was good timing in my life, I guess.”

Gallagher says she doesn’t have much planned yet after her June 14, 2014, opening at Dragatomi in Sacramento.

She has started experimenting with other media and tools as well, and Oahu residents can often get lucky with a one-of-a-kind print at a monthly flea market the artist frequents with smaller, quickly created pieces. For the last few, she’s done everything from Wes Anderson characters to hot dog and hamburger monsters.

“I’ve been using watercolor and gouache a lot more lately and I’ve been kind of doing more graphic images with black ink and splashes of drippy color, so it’s less form and three-dimensionality,” she says.

She’d like to experiment with sculpture but continue to paint for a living.

“I like just having these solo shows sporadically but what I’d like to do is more nice quality prints and limited editions, so I’m trying to work on that.”

Add Jacqueline Gallagher on Instagram, @Jackiepaintdead, to see her works in progress, her fun flea market prints and her cute kitties. Or, catch her starting June 14 through July 5, 2014 at Dragatomi, 2317 J Street, Sacramento.

Lee “Leecifer” Gajda brings paintings and his creepy vinyl friends to Dragatomi

During our interview, artist Lee “Leecifer” Gajda brings up what he says is an old adage regarding art. “You can buy it or make it,” he said. “But you can’t do both.” The adage held true for Gajda, and in a roundabout way it is what propelled him down the path toward vinyl toy customization, which is what has made him a force in the underground art world.

When we spoke to Gajda, he was at his home in Oakland, packing up his artwork (about 22 toys and 18 paintings in total by his count) for his current show at Contemporary Conflagrations, which is running now through July 19, 2011 at Dragatomi in Sacramento. The artist was chatty and instantly friendly over the phone. It was the sort of jubilant personality you’d expect from someone who spends his life doing what he loves. However, the life of an artist wasn’t always what Gajda thought he wanted, opting instead for a 401(k) and early retirement, he said. He spent years working as an art director for a phone company, but when a corporate merger would have forced him to move to Texas to keep his job, he bowed out of the corporate world.

“They had a job for me, but they had moved all the artistic services to Dallas or somewhere in Texas,” Gajda said. “I love the West Coast, man. Screw that.”

Gajda said he got on the vinyl toy “bandwagon” pretty early on, about eight or 10 years ago. It was even before Kidrobot, a store that is sort of a touchstone for the vinyl toy culture, opened its doors in San Francisco. Prior to venturing into toys, Gajda did some work as a gig poster artist for The Pine, a venue in Livermore, Calif. Through his gig poster work, he was fortunate enough to meet Frank Kozik. At Kozik’s home, Gajda got turned on to vinyl toys.

“I went to his house, and he had what would have at that point in time been considered the roots of the vinyl movement,” he explained. “He had a lot of Bounty Hunter and stuff from Japan. The first pieces I actually customized were pretty pricey stuff, which is actually funny because I wish now that I had a lot of that stuff back. You reach for the first thing you can in terms of painting, so I had picked up some really nice pieces over the Internet and proceeded to paint them. I sold them, and at the time it seemed like a good idea, but once you become a collector, you’re like, ‘Damn it! I wish I had that piece back.’”

It wasn’t just his encounter with Kozik that inspired Gajda to start customizing toys, but also his and his wife Michelle’s love for collecting art by Sam Flores, Jeremy Fish and others in the Bay Area underground art scene. However, when Gajda lost his job, it wasn’t economically feasible for the couple to drop over two-grand on paintings any more. They could, however, buy toys based on the works of these and other likeminded artists. It was this idea that anything could be a canvas that inspired Gajda to try his hand in painting toys.

“I thought, even before the first proliferation of heavy toy shows, these guys, their attitude is that they’ll paint anything,” he said. “They’ll go throw down on a big burner piece on a wall somewhere, or they’ll sculpt something, or they’ll have their own vinyl toy produced. No disrespect to them, but I saw it as a canvas.”

Gajda said part of the thrill was being a part of a scene that was just getting started.

“You could feel it growing locally,” Gajda enthused. “That’s why I have such an affinity with the toy thing. I got to see it start. How often do you get to be a part of a scene that gestates in front of you?”

The artist admitted that he’s not sure about the future of the vinyl toy movement. He questioned its longevity and also expressed concern over the carbon footprint of working with vinyl (i.e. that it’s shipped from overseas in most cases and how the waste materials from its production process are handled). For the time being, he’s happy where he’s at. He even has his own toy, a creature called Honoo the Flame, that has been produced by Super7. Gajda discusses his new show at Dragatomi and other developments in the following interview.

Has the carbon footprint aspect of the vinyl toys pushed you more toward conventional painting?
My focus…my future is going to be producing art. I don’t want to go back to a corporate job. My skill set now could easily be replicated by a kid coming out of college who’s going to work twice as hard, be less bitchy, have all the current applications under his belt and be willing to work for half the price of what I would want. So I’m kind of screwed as far as getting a corporate job goes. At this point too, I’m covered in tattoos. I like my cocktails. I’m not the corporate material I might have been once upon a time. I really enjoy making art, and I’m happy that people are buying the paintings. I’ll continue to do toys as long as they’re around, and hopefully that will be a long time. The show I’m doing at Dragatomi, I think, has a nice blend of both…

The show you’re having at Dragtomi is called Contemporary Conflagrations and its logo is an image of the Honoo character. Is that the centerpiece of the exhibit?
Oh yeah. The show is based around the release. When you finally get your own toy, you want to share it with your friends. I’ve gotten to work with the Dragatomi folks for some time now, and I immediately thought it would be really cool to have a show and a release at their toy store. I’ve done a few group shows since the release of the figure, and in some cases, I put flames on all the toys. In this case, I didn’t do it as much. I was looking for a specific image or feeling for each toy. I didn’t just liberally apply the flame motif to everything.

There are a bunch of little paintings that are shots of the Honoo. The bigger images don’t have the Honoo at all, and the toys, I did a half-dozen Honoos, but it’s a pretty nice mix. I didn’t want people to walk in–specifically the kids–and see all these horrifying toys on fire. It’s an all-ages show. There’s no nudity, no flaming penises.

No flaming penises? Not even one?
I’ve been known to toss a penis in periodically or a good female genitalia, but no, there are no genitalia in this show, and even if there was, none of it would be on fire. I think we have a nice mesh of art for folks to check out.

Were the Honoo something you created or something taken from folklore?
To my knowledge, it’s something that I created. I might have borrowed liberally from folklore, but off the top of my head, it was unconscious if I did so. I gave it a background story so it would mesh with the rest of the Monster Family toys. Super7 had been making their own product for quite some time, and Brian Flynn is just an amazing designer, just a master of his craft. They’ve made some incredibly wonderful toys. They were working with a lot of the people in the vinyl toy scene who’d already had toys. With the Monster Family line, they’re working with folks who’ve never had a toy, or American artists, or people who are on the fringes of what would be considered the vinyl scene but still very relevant in the underground world. It’s just really great. Some of them are well known people like Kathie and Brandt [artists Kathie Olivas and Brandt Peters]…you’d have to look them up online to get everybody. But there was a few dudes who’d never had a toy, myself included, which was really killer…

It takes quite a while from start to finish to get a toy made. It took more than a year, and we had talked about it a year before that. They make a sculpt, they make a master mold, then I think they make a metal mold and pull the vinyl. Then they make a paint mask and actually paint it. It’s quite a process.

It sounds like it would be, to go through production and manufacturing.
Yeah, for just one little toy, it’s kind of crazy, which is why the collectibility is so high. The way Super7 does it, they produce in really small runs and small quantities. This isn’t about trying to make a dime. This is about trying to make a superior quality piece, and I think they’ve done that successfully, which is why I was excited about getting the opportunity to work with Super7. The first color wave sold out remarkably fast, and the second one has as well. I think it’s been well-received. My concerns were that they’d languish on the shelves forever and ever. The interesting thing is that the flippers haven’t gotten to them yet. People are saving them for their own collections. I haven’t seen a single one on eBay.

Another thing that happened, the larger sculpting community turns their nose up at people customizing toys. They think if you’ve taken something out of circulation, you’re limiting people’s ability to get their hands on it. But I’ve always felt that they’re toys, you can do whatever you want to them. I love the customizing aspect. There are dozens of dudes who are producing all kinds of radical reinterpretations of art. The first thing I did when I got my own toy was put my money where my mouth was. I invited everyone to buy them and fuck them up as much as they wanted to. Go nuts! Paint them. Some of the toy heads flashed me the middle finger on that one, but my friends just went nuts. Lots of customizers bought these things up. I don’t know how many of the original two color waves are left. They might be a rare collectible at some point just because everyone’s painted them.

One other piece, I saw it on your blog, it’s like a pig with a human head and wings on the ears. Is that part of the exhibit?
Oh yeah, that’s Jermaine Rogers’ Squire. There’s a funny story about that piece. That particular one is about 5 or 6 inches wide, and maybe 3 or 4 inches tall. They made a few fiberglass ones that are larger than, or about the size of a real dog. Scaled up, that head is three or four times human size. It’s a really creepy piece. We were lucky to get one from Jermaine. When my in-laws saw it, they were like, “Holy Christ! Who put Bill Clinton’s head on a dog’s body?” I guess when you scale it up it does look sort of like Bill Clinton. We’re calling that piece The Harbinger, I think.

Leecifer’s Contemporary Conflagrations is open now through July 19, 2011. While you’re checking out his work, look for the rare Propane/Dragatomi Blue Honoo figure, which is sold out everywhere else, but now available at Dragatomi. Go to Dragatomi.com for more info.

Toy Sculptor Jay222 follows his gut… and then spills it on his grotesque creations

Following your instincts may sound like the easiest thing in the world to do, unless of course a primal urge is pulling you in an unlikely direction. East Bay toy sculptor Jay222 can certainly relate. Just a handful of years ago, he was enrolled in the Paul Mitchell school, studying hard at the hopes of “working full-force in a salon” as a hair stylist. But a class in special effects/horror movie makeup drastically changed the course of his life.

“That one-day class made me want to put all my focus toward creating monsters instead of doing people’s hair,” he says.

Though his skill at his craft may speak of a life’s work, in reality Jay is relatively new to sculpting. He says he started in 2006, barely five years ago. In fact, fine arts were just something he appreciated in the past. He admits he used to “paint a little bit,” but one day he went down to an art store to pick up some clay and decided to make sculpts of his friends just to see how they would come out and to impress the many visitors to his then home in Daly City, Calif.

“We always had a lot of people over,” Jay says. “I’d constantly come into contact with so many new people, and I just thought it would be dope if the people who lived in the house had their own figures set up on the fireplace.”

The turn in Jay’s path that led him to toy sculpting occurred when he wanted to bestow a fellow artist with a token of his esteem. After getting tattooed by Horitaka, a renowned tattoo artist and owner of State of Grace in San Jose, Calif., Jay made his way to San Francisco to buy him a gift.

“I was loving his tattoo work,” Jay explains. “I was loving what he put on me. He’s such an amazing artist, so I wanted to give him a gift. I went down to Haight Street in San Francisco–Kidrobot–and I came across a tattooed Dunny [“a blank canvas designed to be repainted and reinterpreted by artists from many different backgrounds,” according to the Kidrobot website; it takes its name from its cartoonish rabbit shape] that Huck Gee had made. That was my first exposure to the art toys, and from there, I was just hooked.”

Jay isn’t the first fine artist to make the jump into making art toys. For example, in addition to the work of Gee, a United Kingdom-born illustrator and toy sculptor, Kidrobot’s Dunny series also includes the work of Japanese manga artist Junko Mizuno and Frank Kozik, best known for his iconic rock posters.

“I think a lot of it has to do with nostalgia, but it’s also something you can hold,” Jay says of the fine art toy movement. “You can bring it with you. You can bring it on trips. You’re able to collect them and display them as three-dimensional art pieces in your home or studio. I think that has a lot to do with it.”

Whatever the reason, toys are clearly not just for kids any more. A quick perusal of Jay’s creations is proof of that. On his website, Jay222toy.blogspot.com, Jay has posted videos (one featuring DJ Qbert) of the artist at work. In them, you can see as he turns blank, white, rodent-shaped action figures into grotesque (yet still kind of cute) creatures–the kind that would make George Romero, Sam Raimi or even Italian “Godfather of Gore” Lucio Fulci proud. Jay’s horror-inspired work can also be found here in Sacramento at Dragatomi, which features his splatter-ific Benny Burlap sculpts and the charmingly nauseating Up-Chuck Throw-Up Kids figure. What’s remarkable about these creations isn’t only the vivid and twisted imagination behind them, but also the level of detail. Strangely enough, it’s Jay’s training as a hairdresser that honed is skill in recreating sinew and fascia.

“At [the Paul Mitchell school], they teach you all anatomy,” Jay says. “I studied it during school and kept all the books and kept looking at all the anatomy and kept trying to match the muscle tissue in the books and recreate what it would look like on these characters.”

Jay will bring a whole slew of memorable characters to Dragatomi April 9 with the opening of his latest art show. A tribute to one of his all-time favorite films, Big Trouble in Little China, this will be the first show for which Jay has served as curator. He’s getting off to quite a start, too. Also featured alongside Jay will be notable artists such as local favorite Skinner, Dave Correia, Task One and Alex Pardee.

“I met Alex a couple years back at Wondercon,” Jay says of Pardee. “When I first saw his work, it really blew me away–his detail, his colors, his imagination. He’s brilliant. He’s a genius. His work really caught me, and I’ve always been a big fan. I was really stoked when he said he’d be down for it.”

Jay describes Big Trouble in Little China as a film that has “everything.” Debuting in 1986 and starring Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall, it’s a story of a truck driver (Russell) who ends up in the thick of an ancient, mystical battle in Chinatown. The action-adventure/comedy was directed by John Carpenter, better known for his horror films such as The Serpent and the Rainbow and the Halloween series (the good one, not the Rob Zombie one).

“It had black magic, sword fight scenes, martial arts, comedy, monsters, creatures,” Jay gushes about Big Trouble in Little China “It had everything that’s awesome about a movie in one movie.”

While his love for the campy classic is clear, would other artists jump on board and share his fervor for the film?

“I wasn’t really sure how it would go over, because I’ve never seen a show that was based on one film,” Jay says. “I’m sure there have been gallery showings that are based on one film, but I wasn’t aware of any, and I wasn’t sure how it would go over with other artists.”

However, Jay stuck with his original idea, and in the end found that others were just as stoked about the project as he was. “It felt right,” he says.

Jay also went with his gut when creating his contribution to the show. He sculpted the Three Storms, characters from the film imbued with the powers of thunder, rain and lightning, which will be available in three different versions thanks to Task One, who helped Jay with the roto-cast resin process.

“I kind of normally stick with my first instincts as to what to make,” Jay says.

And why not? They seem to be serving him well thus far.

Big Trouble in Little China: A Tribute opened at Dragatomi on April 9. A full list of participating artists can be found at Jay222’s website, Jay222toy.blogspot.com. Dragatomi is located at 2317 J Street in Sacramento and online at Dragatomi.com