My KOFY Break with Nicolas Caesar

I have a special place in my heart for horror hosts. I grew up watching programs like Creature Features in the San Francisco Bay Area with hosts Bob Wilkins and John Stanley.

Creepy KOFY Movie Time is a throwback to the early days of live TV where hosts would show classic horror films and cult oddities late at night to an eager audience of fans like myself. The show currently airs every Saturday night at 11PM on KOFY TV20 or CABLE13 in the Bay Area and they’re about to kick start Season 5 of the show. Hosts Balrok and No Name introduce the movies and during breaks colorful guests including local bands, erotic dancers, comedians, magicians and ghost hunters entertain viewers. It’s a fun program and local artist Nicolas Caesar has been a guest on the show numerous times. He’ll be appearing on Creepy KOFY Movie Time February 19th and I recently had the chance to talk to him about the program as well as his art, which is often inspired by the movies he watches.

 

Q: When I learned that you were taking part in the opening episode of Creepy KOFY Movie Time’s 2011 season I couldn’t resist using the opportunity to ask you a few questions about your involvement in the show and your horror-themed artwork. I know you grew up in the Bay Area and like myself, you were a big fan of local horror hosts like Bob Wilkins and John Stanley, who entertained Bay Area audiences with programs like Creature Features and Capt. Cosmic in the ’70s and ’80s. How did you get involved with Creepy KOFY Movie Time?

A: When I saw that they were bringing back local TV programs I pitched to them an idea I had about a local arts showcase. I had pretty much showed with every local artist and knew most of them personally. A few days passed and I got an email from Mark Baker the Promotions Coordinator / Producer replying “Better yet, let’s have you on the show!” and I’ve been back ever since. My most recent appearance is for the Herschell Gordon Lewis film Color Me Blood Red and I talk about the perks and liabilities of painting with blood (Ed. note: All in fun of course!). On set, the best way I can describe it is being at a BBQ where all your friends are either in costumes or are nearly nude. It’s both comfortable and surreal.

Q: It always looks like the folks at Creepy KOFY Movie Time are having a good time. It’s like a party on set. Color Me Blood Red sounds like the perfect kind of horror movie for an artist like yourself to talk about since it’s basically the story of a tortured artist. Are you a Herschell Gordon Lewis fan? And who are some of the other filmmakers you like?

A: I can remember renting Herschell Gordon Lewis’ films in those giant plastic clamshell cases. Mom and pop video stores were awesome because films were more regulated by the people that owned or worked there rather than Blockbuster and it’s two thousand copies of Shrek 3. It was a treasure hunt. Every video store carried different titles. You’d find Cannibal Holocaus at one and Suspiria at another. Video stores in the 80′s mixed Attack of the Mushroom People and Dumbo. It was great! If you were lucky you’d find a Jodorowsky or Richard Kern film on the shelf. There was no limits to how far down the rabbit hole you could go.

Creature Features really introduced me to film. As a kid all I wanted to see was robots and monsters. It also taught me philosophy; they’d kill a giant bug and start on with “Maybe it’s man’s arrogance to think he is superior… etc etc”. Most horror/sci-fi was written by beatniks because they could get away with it. Romero will tell you about all the parables in Dawn of the Dead. That really planted the seed. I love cotton-candy horror like The Killer Shrews and Giant Leeches but I also yearn for films with a philosophy like Videodrome, Cemetery Man and The Most Dangerous Game. I’m a ritualistic film watcher. Troll 2, Attack of the Beast Creatures, Cane Toads, Okie Noodling, Dirt, these are all party movies. Same with TV Carnage and Everything is Terrible compilations. Other films I have VERY intimate relationships with. These are the films I watch by myself with a bottle of wine or a 6 pack of Fat Tire beer and just take everything in. Lost in Translation is perhaps one of my favorite films and everything Wes Anderson does. Somehow these films are able to create artificial nostalgia in my psyche. It’s possibly the closest I come to a religious experience. For an hour and a half things are right in the world. When it comes to favorite filmmakers it’s hard because every filmmaker is hit and miss for me. I love Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice but hated Sweeney Todd. I love Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation but hated Marie Antoinette. I love Charles Band’s Terrorvision, in my top 5, but he makes some crap too. I love John Carpenter’s The Thing, Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China. I even liked They Live. It’s really a mixed bag. When it comes to film I can go on forever.

Q: Movies seem to inspire you a lot. I find references to all kinds of films in your work from classic horror like The Creature From the Black Lagoon to Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited. You mentioned that sometimes watching a film can almost feel like a religious experience and I think I understand that. Some movies have had a profound effect on me as well and afterward I see the world with new eyes. Artists are inspired by all kinds of things. Some spend their lives painting landscapes or portraits. Why do you think you find so much inspiration in movies?

A: Artists are visual people. We become artists because we feel or see things outside the box. When we’re born we’re forcefed language and feel constrained and limited by it. Every emotion can’t fit into a trite definition. Filmmakers, actors, actresses, puppeteers have to express intense moments non-verbally. When an artist paints a picture they’re trying to pull you into an experience. Minimal art to me expresses loneliness, portrait painters are very much like Frankenstein and obsess on achieving the impossible, pop art is entertainment, collage speaks to the packrats all of us and surrealism is that exploration of something more. We’re all creating out of nothing and are producing something. It in itself is alive and at the same time doesn’t exist. Art lives more and mutates in the mind. It expands through memory. If you see a piece of art and it provokes you enough to remember it then the artist did his work by planting the seed. The seed grows inside the subconscious and expands into the network. This may seem insignificant at the time but it colors choices, memory, ideas, everything. We identify our world in patterns and or brains will reference that piece of art over and over again in both feelings and design so it’s no surprise that artists around other artists influence each other regularly.

H.R. Giger is a good example. All you have to do is open a tattoo magazine to see his global influence. Artists like Camille Rose Garcia, Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, and myself are visual mutations of Fleischer cartoons. Film, music, and art are all complementary to each other. The Brothers Quay’s music videos are great examples of all three. And you’ve got to paint what you know and I know cartoons and monster movies.

Q: You started out making enormous sculptures for night clubs and Halloween theme parks but shifted gears about 8 years ago and started concentrating on painting. Why the switch? And do you still enjoy working on sculptures occasionally?

A: Space was a big issue. Everyone loved the sculptures but few bought them because most people in the Bay Area live in tiny studio apartments. I’d been struggling for years with my sculptures, which I poured my blood and everything into and even with magazine and news coverage I think people embraced them more as a traveling sideshow than art that they could own. I did like shipping them though, nothing like asking the fine people at U-Haul for a box big enough to ship a body in.

I had to re-teach myself how to paint. Sculptures were pretty much assemblages of strange things I’d find while walking train tracks where as paintings were more Rorschachs. I would throw paint down, sculpt it, layer it, repeat. I never know what they’ll turn out to be until I’m done. Sometimes they’re goofy, other times they’re frightening or melancholy. It’s polishing an idea. When I showcased them for the first time at The Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco I sold out! It was a weird feeling. I think it’s because they’re like records. You can buy a lot and store them easy. It’s easier for people to hang a 16×20 painting than it is for them to clear space for an inanimate spikey roommate.

Currently I’m focusing on puppets for The Mosquito and Spider show. It’s the marriage of the two. I like that I can build the entire cast and animate them. There’s something creepy and funny about puppet shows. Art is a journey, not a destination and it takes on many forms. In 10 years I might be building amusement parks.

Q: I know that you’ve shown your work in all kinds of venues and participated in group shows as well as solo shows. You’ve also curated some art shows. One of the most recent art exhibits you curated and participated in was the Scream 4 exhibit, which is also part of Wes Craven’s upcoming Scream 4 film. Can you tell me a little bit about the Scream 4 exhibit and how you got involved in it?

A: I’m represented in LA by the Hyaena Gallery, which caters to collectors of unpopular art, true crime artifacts, pin-ups, and dark art. Patton Oswalt, Guerillmo Del Toro and others frequent there because it’s your one-stop shop for everything weird. Skip Crank, who had done props for Firefly, Cursed, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the previous Scream movies was looking for a sketch artist for the film adaptation of the video game Clock Tower. Martin Weisz, who made Grimm Love was directing it and he had a reputation for changing his mind every 5 minutes. I was able to keep up. Sometimes I even posed as 10 different artists. The project was to create a sketch book for a crazy woman. I think some of the other artists did them too polished. Hyaena is flooded with talent but it’s hard for someone who is a perfectionist to let go of that and let the flaws happen. My ability to work under pressure and being versatile got me the job on Clock Tower. I was excited! I lost my chance to have my art in a Charles Band film, but now Hollywood! The writer of Jason X! I was going to be Milla Jovovich’s sketch artist! Then it was shelved. It was then that I learned two hard truths about filmmaking. 1) Anything can happen and 2) As long as you’re paid it’s all good.

Cut to some later time, Wes Craven in putting together Scream 4, mostly for a family reunion for all the people who had worked on the previous films. The setting is very different, the Stab films have exploded, there are box sets, posters and fan art. Skip and I exploited the fan art idea and pitched Wes the idea. I have an arsenal of artists that I represent with The Scary-Art Collective. We work under tight deadlines regularly. Each month a gallery will hit us with a new theme and we have to create new bodies of work to match it. In Scream 4 we had a week. The variety was its strength, everything from portrait to raw was represented. Everyone was impressed. David Arquette twittered a bunch of pictures. Wes Craven was displaying them in his office. It was great.

Q: You mentioned The Scary-Art Collective, which is a a group you started and I also know you co-founded The Mail Art Consortium. You seem to really go out of your way to bring artists together and help them get their work shown and shared with an appreciative audience. Can you tell me some more about these groups and how they got started?

A: The Mail Art Consortium was started from us just mailing weird stuff to each other. We wanted to test the limits of the post office. Sometimes they were funny, other times socially poignant. Several members of the collective showed together a lot. We’d answer the same calls and be part of the same themes. After a while it just seemed to make sense to start the collective. People already thought we were in one. We were just the girls who couldn’t say no! The intent behind the collective was a network and support system for artists. Everyone in it is down to earth and someone you can have a beer with. We’ve kept it that way ever since. Being an artist is a hard enough job but there is strength in numbers. When I started out there was no one to give me real world advice. Artists were either too competitive, paranoid of just plain crazy. It was an ‘all about me’ aesthetic. It’s stupid. I never wanted to be like that. I’ve always done the opposite and shared resources and connections. I haven’t any delusions of ownership. Every good thing that’s happened to me was because I was there for someone else. The art world is a very different animal today than it was in the 80′s. There’s no gallery owner in a big white limo to save you from your whoring ways. As an artist you are a whore by nature, you’re selling yourself to friends and strangers. You’re always publicizing your availability and you never say ‘no’ to a paying job. It’s a hard life but it’s the only life you have.

Q: I love the idea of The Scary-Art Collective and I wish there was something similar for writers or bloggers. It’s not easy building any kind of support system with other creative folks these days. There’s a lot of competition and egos involved when dealing with other creative types so I admire your effort to try and bring people together and share ideas, resources, etc. Earlier you mentioned that Wes Craven had taken a real liking to your work for Scream 4. Has this led to any other film related projects or are there any more movie-themed exhibits in the works?

A: It’s unfortunate. But there’s a sort of intelligence that comes with being taken for granted. Artists, writers, musicians tend to get into these occupations because they are more challenging. Nothing comes easy, you always have to think on your feet, and the rewards are few and far between but again it’s the journey. We do what we love. People love what we do. I think it’s far more respectable being an artist, writer or musician than it is to be a number in a huge corporation apathetically destroying the earth. Artists scavenge for things to paint on be they in dumpsters or thrift stores. Writers use their minds and keyboards and musicians use minimal amounts of electricity. We were green before there was a green.

As for more movie-themed work, I auditioned to be Matt Damon’s disturbed sons sketch artist in a new Cameron Crow movie. We’ll see what happens. And I’ve got more movie themed art shows on the way.