Crafty Bastards Vendor Q&A with Dirty Pictures
This interview continues a series of Q&A’s featuring vendors who participated in the 2007 Crafty Bastards fair. Last year, we didn’t get to post all of the Q&As before the festival was upon us, so here they are now!
Dirty Pictures is a one-man show consisting of Anthony Dihle and his silkscreen press. Ever since moving to the DC area, Dihle has made a name for himself, intertwining his art with the DC music scene by designing show posters for bands like The Hard Tomorrows and Bellman Barker. Dirty Pictures also plays with darker, off-beat themes, producing printed recipe cards based on the last meals of inmates on death row. These cards were featured at last year’s Crafty Bastards Festival!
In between festivals and private art shows, Dihle takes time to share his silkscreen knowledge, giving workshops last summer on fabric silkscreening at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, MD. He also gave this interview to us, providing insight on how he came to master his craft.
1. How long have you been making things?
I’ve been screenprinting for 5 years, making posters for 3 years.
2. What is your earliest/favorite crafting memory?
When I was little I had a babysitter who showed us how to make ramps and tunnels for matchbox cars out of toilet paper tubes. Little racecourses.
3. Why do you make things?
It feels good, I can trade with the stuff I screenprint. It’s a purer if sloppier form of my day job, graphic designer. And I’m a big showoff.
4. What sort of things do you make?
Mostly, posters for bands. Because that’s who asks for them. I’ll make posters for anything, including yard sales and block parties. And occasionally art prints, but I feel sort of rudderless with art prints, I’m comfortable with the specific-ness of promoting a show/ event.
5. Any success stories you’d care to share?
When bands tell me that their posters get stolen from storefronts and walls I’m secretly delighted with the thieves.
6. Inspirations?
Yeah, lots. People, music, art, science, history, photography, books & magazines, old nintendo, other designers, comics, machines, robots, animals, monsters, places… a specific big influence is Fort Thunder and the whole art/music scene in Providence, Rhode Island when I went to college there a few years ago. Fort Thunder was a colony of artists and musicians, noise rock and experimental stuff. The Fort was in a 100+ year old mill building in the dank part of town. The prints and posters in Providence at that time were insane. Intensely colorful, erratic, schizophrenic, often barely legible, and typically had the one-dimensionality and narrative tracking of a child’s drawing.
7. Craft supplies you can’t live without?
Table, inks, squeegee, x-acto, macintosh, camera.
8. Describe your work area.
In a section of my apartment is my printing table, which was formerly an air-hockey table. Every flat surface in my apartment is used as a drying rack, since I don’t have a proper one.
9. Family? Pets? Plants?
My parents are curious/supportive of my printmaking. My little brother is a photorealist painter living in Brooklyn. He makes very large paintings of raw beef. He works at Sotheby’s during the day as a financial person. He’s 23, I’m 25. I had a tomato plant but sadly it bore no fruit and died in my window. I have some dried-up flowers in a red stripe bottle, and some fake flowers in tin cans. Hobo decor.
10. Favorite color or pattern?
I’m stumped on both.
11. Have you been a Crafty Bastard before?
Yeah, last year. It was fun and financially worthwhile, so here I am again. It was also the first time I got to see how larger numbers of people responded to my work. Fun.
12. Tell us about other crafters you love and your favorite handmade purchases.
Too many to name, but my favorite posters that I’ve acquired were trades. Or ones that I peeled off walls after the show, of course. The Dutch and Canadians especially seem like good postermakers. Seriously. And of course the other DC poster guys including Jeff, Tim, and John. There’s a good variety of styles and methods among us.
13. What is one thing everyone should know how to do themselves?
Basic home and auto stuff. Caulk a bathtub, cook eggs, jumpstart a car. Home and garage crafts.
