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- - - - Sarah Vowell Questions Marcel Dzama About Canada and Colour On a page of Marcel Dzama's sketchbook, monsters play baseball beneath a Winnipeg weather forecast predicting a high of 25 below—Celsius, but still. The understandably indoorsy Dzama has put down on paper an entire Manitoba of the mind, a great and terrible territory in ink, watercolor, and root beer, populated by lady-biting bats, waltzing bird-headed men, and adorable, gun-slinging little girls. In this place, Dracula's house stands next to an Internet café. A teacher writes the word "decapitation" on a blackboard—a word, by the way, which will come in handy here. All very mysterious, and yet the real mystery of Dzama's art is the elegance of all these demons, all this gore. There is a delicacy. This guy can make a knife fight between a lion and a bear seem endearing. An amputee, in Dzama's hands, somehow bleeds nothing but charm. Born in 1974, Dzama attended the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where he continues to live. In 1996, he was one of the founders of the Royal Art Lodge, a group of six artists (including Dzama's then-12-year-old sister Hollie) who got together every Wednesday night to draw. While each of the Lodgers mounted solo careers, the band still gets back together once a week to mark and write on shared drawings, stuffing the embarrassing ones into a Sad Cloud suitcase; a Sun Face suitcase contains the ones they like. SV: This drawing inscribed "Count Dracula sends his message of damnation to the people of Canada": To me, it's funny because why on earth would Dracula ever even notice Canada, much less go there or care? I just never pictured vampires in Canada. No offense, but traditionally they favor jazzier spots—Central Europe, New Orleans, Southern California, Paris, etc. Maybe I'm just xenophobic, but what does Canada have to offer the undead? MD: In the winter we have less daylight than most places, probably a lot less than those jazzier spots you mentioned. I do think that he would have more time to do nighttime things, although he may die of frostbite doing them. I do enjoy putting Dracula in atypical environments. I like the idea of him having frostbite too. As a self-deprecating Canadian, I really can't imagine him ever really caring about us, but I can't help it if I wish he did. SV: I'm very keen on the tree people. Anything you care to divulge about their origin? I can't quite decide whether they're benign or not. I mean, they're trees, which a person tends to think of fondly and less suspiciously than your other monsters, but then again they're slightly menacing. MD: I wish I could tell you that the tree people came from the seventh circle of Hell, those who had committed violence on themselves, but the truth is that I grew up with them. They were ominous and dark figures in my favourite stories and fairy tales that I loved and loathed in equal parts. They are slightly menacing, but at the same time they are trees, so they must be wise. Later, when I read The Inferno, I was very interested to read about the seventh circle of Hell, and I've adapted some of that feeling to my own tree people. Perhaps earlier on they were more pleasant, but lately they have become more dangerous. SV: About the root beer: When did you hit on the idea of using root beer to color your drawings? What's its appeal? MD: A long time ago I was visiting my grandparent's farm in Fosston, Saskatchewan, and we had gone to the general store to buy some root beer base. We had just planned to make some homemade pop with this brand called Old Fashioned Home Brew. It was then at my grandma's kitchen table that I spilled some of the root beer syrup on to my sketchbook. It was a very rich brown, and since I was already drawing bears quite a bit, as an experiment I used it like a watercolour on a drawing. I liked it so much that I went back to the store and bought more. I still use it because I haven't found a watercolour or ink base that compares. SV: Do the drawings smell like root beer? MD: The drawings do smell slightly of root beer, but I think it goes away after about a year's time. The root beer dominates quite a few of my drawings, because I tend to use mostly browns when I paint. SV: Your palette is rather melancholy, colors that are found in nature and/or army textiles. Is this just some intrinsic preference of yours, or something more? For someone who seems inspired by cartoons, you seem to have no truck at all with the usual candy colors of animation. Why? MD: Bright colours have never really appealed to me in my own work. I prefer the muted tones of brown and green. They are more subtle and less obtrusive. I enjoy comics and cartoons, but somehow a limited palette appeals to my more sinister side. SV: When I was an art history student, I always liked writing about the groups—Dada, Fluxus, de Stijl. I liked the art, but I was also drawn to the idea of a bunch of mismatched people hanging around each other and being together and drinking drinks and coffee and doing their own thing but always coming together once a day or year or whatever and designing a cafe or hacking up a piano together. Do you, with regards to the Royal Art Lodge, feel any kinship with those groups? Romanticize togetherness? MD: I like and am inspired by Dada, Fluxus, and de Stijl. But I'm just not sure if the comparison quite befits the RAL—mainly because somehow we seem so much more low-brow and unsophisticated than any of them. We are definitely a tight knit group of friends whose form of social interaction is largely art-making. We don't have an agenda per se, but somehow drawing with other people is so much more fun than doing it by yourself. SV: I'm going to stereotype your whole country, but Canadians seem to talk up the collective spirit as a nation way more than we do, we the individuals. Do you think your group bears out this national bent? MD: If there is a Canadian factor in our togetherness, perhaps it is borne out of the isolation of living in a small city like Winnipeg, and the cold weather. We are not able to go outside too often because right now your skin will freeze within minutes. We like to huddle together to stay warm. - - - -
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