Please introduce yourself.

My name is N.C. Mallory. I was born in Salem, Oregon in 1945, attended schools in California and elsewhere, and taught at colleges and universities on the west coast for 33 years, retiring in 2000. I might add that I taught English Literature and composition, and only a few art classes, mostly at the beginning of my teaching career.

But I have been dedicated, from about the age of ten, to drawing, painting and visual art generally.

I also write and have published books of poetry and many essays and stories.

Why do you use Flickr?

I use Flickr because it gives me the ability to contact a large audience of viewers quickly and easily. One of the most delightful things about it is its global character. After two years on this service I have garnered many thousands of views of my work from subscribers in Europe, Asia, North and South America. I was even invited to a fine group exhibition with three other artists last year as a result of Flickr– in Chicago!

What compels you to create your art?

I have wanted to be an artist ever since I discovered what artists were and what they do. I gave up dreaming about becoming an astronomer when I was fifteen because of the math involved. But I’m still an avid sky-watcher, and I’m grateful I lived long enough to keep in contact with the Hubble Telescope on the Internet. The Kepler mission is also very exciting– Go Kepler!

You’ve stated in other interviews that you value your passion for creating art over making money. In what way has money influenced your creative journey?

I knew I hated both business with its conniving and greed and politics with its chameleon demands on one’s personality and character. I’m not good enough looking to be in the movies, and I play music mostly for my own amusement (and amazement). I voted for Obama, incidentally, and I’m pleased to see the Bush Gang of thieves, criminals and liars retired.

I suppose I have relegated myself to the moderate income group ever since I discovered what it takes to make lots of bucks. Art affords me a way of looking beyond this world, and, paradoxically, deeper into the world’s mysteries. Flickr is a fine way to expose oneself to what other cultures create. I’m enormously encouraged for the future of art when I see how many talented people are out there. The human race is doing fine, but human society still has light-years to go to become more tolerant of all human citizens. Nothing new in that observation, I know. But artists can help show the way.

As a Flickr friend (siptakg) said to me, ” We have to show them . . .”. That’s a great motto for any visual artist.

You actively engage with your commenters, and your comments on other peoples posts are always inspiring. You obviously value these connections, please explain their importance to you?

Some of the generosity and encouragement one needs just to keep making art comes from one’s fellow artists.

I have worked in virtual isolation much of my life as an artist. Flickr allows me to open my work to others, and to benefit enormously by seeing how others both resemble and differ from me in their artistic problem-solving. Like the community of scientists has always done through publishing , editing and peer-reviewing their ideas and theories, Flickr gives artists a similar point of connection.

I’ve found many fine artists denigrate the value of the comics art. How important are comics to you?

I think I’m a little more omnivorous than some of my artist friends when it comes to the comics, or even advertising art. I look for the art in them on the medium’s own terms, not applying an exclusionary set of standards which denies the category “art” promptly to something new or commercial.

The money-making quality of comics is currently at a bit of an ebb– the medium is trying to re-invent itself and compete with TV, movies and fantasy gaming. Many of the comic book artists I know have shifted to the role of game designer or movie storyboarder. Forty years ago they would have been drawing comic books in earnest.

I adore black and white artwork, though color interests me very much. My favourite comics appeared near the dawn of the medium– I could mention many artists, but Bud Fisher (Mutt and Jeff) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat) were two stand-outs. Also I love Cliff Sterritt.

Later, Roy Crane, Milton Caniff and others made great adventure comics, and I loved the Depression-Era soap operas of Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie).

Like Alex Toth, another of the greatest of all black-and-white comic book artists, I feel that comics have, regrettably, abandoned a great deal of idealism present in their early forms. Part of this opinion has to do with my being an old fuddy-duddy when it comes to excessive sex and violence in the comics.

I’m aware you’re working on your own graphic novel, please tell me about it?

My graphic novels are many in number and all unfinished. You’ll see finished pages scattered all over my Flickr site– but no final book. I have several finished scripts, but can’t pull myself through the drudgery of drawing all those pages. As Robert Crumb famously said: “Comics are a young man’s game . . .” (he’s two years older than I am . . .).

You also mentioned how you were involved in editing and assisting (your title “spiritual director” ) for a good buddy’s new graphic novel. Please tell me more about that?

I have helped out friends, much more capable comic-book artists than I am, with editing and proofing their work. I don’t do any drawing for them. They already know what they want. But I can help them with my editing skills, developed after long years of working at magazines and newspapers.

What music do you listen to when you work?

I listen to classical and jazz while I draw and paint. I have been devoted to classical music since I was about fifteen, and play a little jazz as well as love it. I listen to Miles from the be-bop era when I’m painting abstracts, and Beethoven when I grow “figurative” and cosmic in intent (smiles).

You spoken before about style taking care of itself. Why do you think artists so obsessed with style?

I think we all possess a style in our art. It’s hard to suppress, though it’s fun to make visual parodies, and I’ve done some of that– like a nightclub comic imitating James Cagney or John F. Kennedy. But your “real” style is there even if you don’t recognize it. The way we handle a brush or a pencil has to do with our eyes, our hands and our heart. We can will many things into our art– or will things OUT of our art. But it’s hard to cover up who you are, and not desirable, I’ve decided as I’ve grown older. There are so many hundreds and thousands of people out there painting barns and sunsets and cute kitties and cute babies that the world doesn’t need another such artist.

Style is a work in progress anyway.

Thomas Kinkade touched a nerve with his little lighted cottages, and became a human factory, getting rich in the process. Amazingly, TK was actually a pretty good commercial illustrator before he started running off his cottage yardage. He’s not the only bad painter to get rich– but I do wish he’d stop telling us, like George Bush, that he makes his art in consultation with his best advisor, Jesus Christ.

Do you filter the work that you upload to flickr or do we see everything?

About one in ten watercolors survives. I make dozens of drawings for every one that gets posted on Flickr. Since I haven’t shown publicly in about twenty years (the recent Chicago show is an exception), I have a large backlog. Some of that gets photographed and posted.

Please expand on some of your interests outside of Flickr?

God. My interests? Music, politics, acres and acres of books on history. I don’t read many novels, but I always have three or four books going. I have a large library of quality art books I rely on. And as Poe recommends, I read the same books again and again, always learning something new from them. Philosophy is a game I love to play– and to watch others play– so I read loads of it. Now that I’m over sixty, it’s art, art, art mostly. I love movies and watch them with my wife on DVD. I never go to a theater any more.

Poetry remains a keen interest, but I don’t “keep up” with the latest shifts and trends in contemporary work like I did when I was forty.

There are other interests– walking, classical guitar playing, world music, etc..

Like Blake, I’d call myself a “mental traveller.”

Please recommend a few of your favourite Flickr contacts whose work you follow.

Here are some Flickr artists I keep up with regularly, though not in order of preference:

Gail Siptak
Mariah O.Neill
Barry Farmer
Magi Batet (a Spanish painter)
Diego Tripodi (a marvelous young Argentine artist)

There are many, many others. I shop my way through the MY CONTACTS display board like a teenager in a mall looking for a new cell phone– with great excitement. Flickr is a blessing.

Check out more of NC Mallory’s work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/augustusswift/