On Bruegel (and some Amsterdam weed)

CHRIS LANIER: Another artist you particularly like is Bruegel.

ERIC DROOKER: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, yeah. He's a favorite of mine. I don't know that my work is particularly influenced by him, but nevertheless he's my favorite. I think he appeals to me because his paintings and engravings are always teeming with life and you get a good window into what daily life must have been like back in 16th century Europe. One of the things that was unusual about him for his times was that he painted peasants.. He would paint pictures of peasants getting drunk and having a good time playing bagpipes and dancing and falling down shit-faced drunk on the ground, and didn't bother to paint the aristocracy. He painted a few religious and mythological scenes like the Fall of Icarus and the Tower of Babel and the Slaughter of the Innocents.

LANIER: His work was very scatological, even some of the religious stuff.

DROOKER: Yeah, and his major influence, of course, was Hieronymous Bosch, which is where he got a lot of his surrealism from -- which is seen more in his engravings than in his paintings. But he's just so imaginative, and there's so much movement in the art. You have to go out of your way to look at his paintings. They only have a couple of them in the States, maybe three of them. Virtually all of them are in Vienna and Brussels, where he was from. I visited his house once in Brussels and smoked a joint in Pieter's backyard. There's a story about that, but... His work seems to be a full-sensory experience, right? When I look at his paintings, I not only see the imagery, but I hear the scene. I hear the peasants. I hear the bagpipe music. I hear them dancing. I smell the horse manure and the hay under their feet and the farting. I smell the beer. Like I say, a full sensory experience. That's what art aims for.

There's also synesthesia, the interpenetration of the arts. I very consciously do that in my artwork. Blood Song has a musical motif that runs through it. I'm attempting to conjure sound, even though it's a two-dimensional piece of paper. The reader is supposed to imagine that he's hearing music coming out of the pages. You want to hear the police sirens. It's possible to smell the pollution. I always aim for this in my art work and Bruegel, to me, is the ultimate example of someone who succeeds in this: triggering all of the other senses. Not just sight, but smell, sound, touch, taste; all of the senses come into play with Bruegel. I can't think of too many other artists who pull that off.

LANIER: So you made a pilgrimage of sorts to his home when you were in Europe.

DROOKER: Yeah, I spent long hours trying to see as many of his paintings as I could. He wasn't a terribly prolific painter. Let me rephrase that: not many paintings of his are in existence. He died when he was about my age; in his early 40s. Most of his paintings are there in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. You walk into a room and there's about a dozen of his paintings: the peasants dancing, the peasant wedding, the big Tower of Babel, the Hunters in the Snow, the winter scene. I was in Prague and I went to see his Spring. He did the different seasons -- Spring is in Prague. There are several paintings by his sons. There's a Pieter Bruegel the Younger -- a.k.a. Hell Bruegel, because he was like his daddy: he painted images of Hell, Hieronymous Bosch-style. The other son, Jan Bruegel, was an artist also known as Flower Bruegel, because he painted beautiful things. Rubens would call the younger Bruegel in to paint the little rabbits and insects and all the vegetation in his paintings, because he was such an expert at that. I know that R. Crumb is very influenced by Bruegel and has been compared to Bruegel by none other than Robert Hughes, the art critic. I can see it quite clearly. I think that Crumb is also a rare example of an artist who, when you look at his work in a time capsule, you'll get a pretty good take on what life was like. He covers the full range of experience: his human earthiness and sexuality, and just the tragic comedy of existence. Crumb's later work seems to be consciously influenced by Bruegel's drawings and his graphic work, his engravings - all of those little cross-hatchings...

LANIER: So when you went to Bruegel's house....

DROOKER: Well, one day -- I was living in Amsterdam for about six months. That's where I drew the story "L," the second chapter of Flood! It was all drawn while I was in Amsterdam.

LANIER: Did you get the idea for the story there as well?

DROOKER: No, I got the germ of the idea when I was in New York: I was going have a story about a subway ride. It begins with someone descending into the subway, and he goes back in time. I didn't know exactly how it was going to end up -- if he would meet Neanderthal men down in the tunnel. That's how I was originally gonna do it, but it ended up even weirder than that. But one day [in Amsterdam] I took the Eurail from Holland to Belgium and got off in Brussels and went into the Musées des Beaux-Arts, where I had heard they had a good stash of Bruegel paintings. They had maybe six or seven of them in there, and I spent a long time looking at his paintings -- the Fall of Icarus is in there, I think Children's Games, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Fall of the Rebel Angels. After coming out of the museum, I explored the city until I found his house, still standing where Bruegel lived and worked.

LANIER: You were seeking it out?

DROOKER: I was seeking it out on a map I found there -- one of these tourist maps. I think they have it open to the public, but it was closed on this day so there was no one there, and I wandered out back. There was a little courtyard and there was no one there. So I just sat down and started doing a little sketch of his house. I have a little sketchbook that I always carry with me. His house looked like something right out of one of his paintings. All of his paintings have those kinds of houses in them. And I realized that in my pocket I had a little roach of a joint that I had been smoking, because of course that was part of the reason I was living in Amsterdam for six months: I was such a pothead, and it's so cheap -- you get it right over the counter there. It was great. Plus I had a Dutch girlfriend who had a houseboat, so I had good reason to stay there for six months.

I realized that I had this little roach and I thought, "Oh Fuck." I could've gotten busted coming over the border from Holland to Belgium, which is not as liberal. I could've ended up, you know, Midnight Express -- in jail in Belgium, and I don't know the language or anything. I better dispose of it right now. So I lit it up and got tripping stoned because the potency of the herb they have in Amsterdam is amazing. And I just sat there in Pieter Bruegel's backyard and my imagination went wild looking at his house. I did a little sketch of his house, and I imagined him walking around in those funny shoes, those peasant shoes, and the funny -- what is it called? -- those stocking hose that the men wear with their nuts in the little pouch. And then the sun started going down and I thought, "Oh, I better find my way back to the train station. I'm going to get lost here in Brussels." And I was back in Amsterdam later that night.

LANIER: Do you still have that sketch?

DROOKER: I still have it somewhere in my little sketchbooks. It's got the architecture of his house. Nothing too fancy, but it was a memorable experience. I felt like I was communing with this spirit.

LANIER: Did you bring any of that back to "L," since "L" also has that theme of imaginatively going backwards in time --

DROOKER: Oh, not in any direct way that I can see. I'm always very curious to visit places where favorite artists of mine lived. Of course, Van Gogh and Rembrandt are from Holland, and I spent time in Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam -- a house that he was later evicted from, because he had such debt that they kicked him out. It's now set up as the "Rembrandt Museum." When I was on tour of Germany six years ago, giving a series of slide-lecture performances, I did a stop in Nuremberg and I went to the studio of Albrecht Dürer, which is still standing. A beautiful structure. He was the rare artist who actually was very successful in his lifetime. He owned a whole house, had a big studio upstairs and was like a rock star. And of course, in New York City, there are so many artists who have lived and suffered and died on the Lower East Side -- not just visual artists, but Charlie Parker down the block from me, and Allen Ginsberg a couple of blocks away...

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #253.]

All site contents are © 2002