Twenty-three year old Molly Crabapple got bored posing nude for art classes. “I’m standing there, for 15 bucks an hour, and my back’s hurting, and I’m like, ‘Why can’t this be more fun?’ ” she explains over a cappuccino in Kenmore Square last week. So the freelance illustrator (her drawings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Playgirl, among other places), burlesque performer (she can eat fire), and ex–Suicide Girl with wide eyes, sparkly blue fingernails, and a mischievous grin decided to make it more fun.
Two years ago, Crabapple founded Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, a burlesque-life-drawing class, in Brooklyn, which she’ll bring to Great Scott on February 11, as part of a book tour for the Dr. Sketchy’s Official Rainy Day Colouring Book, authored and inked by her and New Yorker cartoonist John Leavitt. It’s filled with pornographic paper dolls, naughty Victoriana drawings, interviews, drink recipes, and women of ample chest but not quite naked.
In the actual class, a burlesque model does a series of poses; people drink and draw; prizes get doled out; and Crabapple hustles for tips. “One of the principles of Dr. Sketchy’s is that I pay my models a lot of money. With tips, my models get about twice the highest wage of any other place in New York that I know of,” says Crabapple. “Except a gay place where the models have to pose at attention.” Crabapple herself made enough as a nude photographer’s model “to say ‘fuck you’ to day jobs,” and now Dr. Sketchy’s has expanded to 10 cities, including London, Helsinki, Los Angeles, and Rome.
As for whether the drawing class is just for artists? “It is focused on the drawing,” she says, “but in a way that someone who doesn’t necessarily draw can still have fun with. A lot of people like to hang out and bullshit with each other. But yeah, we’re artists. We do draw. Except me. I don’t draw. I just run around and make things happen.”