Echo Test - Mel Kadel
Opening: Thurs Sept 10, 2009 (7-10pm)
Sept 10 - Oct 10, 2009
@FFDG

A few questions sent in from FF viewers for Mel are included.

Hey, thanks Aaron. I never worried about making a living off of art, for many reasons, but I did work really hard at pursuing it. Early on in high school, making drawings became a huge part of how I spent my time.

It's a strange path to be on, and it seems like every artist has to invent their own career in a unique way. I have friends that make a living off of it, and each one has a completely different way of approaching it. It's a good question. I ask people the same thing. Over the years, I gravitated towards jobs that gave me enough freedom to work on my own stuff on the side. It was always really important to have that balance.

I tried approaching magazines and papers for illustration work really early on, with no luck there...i just started showing my drawings in neighborhood galleries and cafes without huge expectations. I collaborated with a lot friends and bands on their album covers. Just small things that kept me busy and working on new stuff. It's been a very fulfilling slow roll, that i'm still figuring out.

from editor: Yok, check some photos from a studio visit we did of Mel and Travis's last January.

It's a desk, by some windows, attached to the kitchen, in my house. I keep my desk clean and there's a pile of inks and pens near by. I move outside to the porch sometimes to change it up and get better light. Travis Millard works in the room next to me, and he's messy.

I think the female(s) in my drawings are a lot of different people. I'm in there somewhere too, but it's not a story completely based around me. I use to draw more than just women, and i'm sure i will again, but over time she just became this reoccurring character that I gravitate towards these days. To me, It's like the scenes and struggles that she gets involved in, are more of what the drawing is about than she is. Her age and ethnicity is meant to be vague, to help not corner her into a stereotype. I really want people to relate to her and what she's conquering, more than her gender.

Hey Pete, I know you. I love working on those books, because putting drawings side by side in a collection ties the ideas behind them together. It takes around 3 months to make 100 books. I'll explain why...

I stain around 1,100 sheets of regular typing paper with coffee, out on my porch. I have a small porch, so I can only do about 20 sheets at a time. The sun bakes them and dries them out, making them wrinkly. So, once they are dry I stick them under a bunch of books and try to flatten them out. They never go back to flat, so I have to manually feed each sheet through my printer. My printer eats them up, spits them out, breaks down a lot.... hates it. That's the part of the process that makes me think it's a terrible idea to begin with, and I swear I'll never do it again. But then i do.

For the cover, I tear down sheets of printing paper and use the great Gocco machine to print the image on the front. I fold and staple all the sheets here and that's that. No part of the process requires me to leave the house, except for the many trips to Staples to get more inks for the printer. I don't even try to make money from these, but only break even if I can, because in the end it is a zine. So far I've made 5 zines like this, and a couple of them I've done 2nd editions. I would love to keep making them, and eventually put them all together. The process mimics how I make an actual drawing, so printing these images onto white glossy pages wouldn't work. If I did do a retrospective publication, there would still need to be coffee and sun involved somehow.

Echo Test - Mel Kadel
Opening: Thurs Sept 10, 2009 (7-10pm)
Sept 10 - Oct 10, 2009
@FFDG

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