CN: You’re also a burlesque performer. Tell us about your decision to come out from behind your easel!

MC: Well, I believe you discovered me, Madame Editrix. I remember my first performance taking place on the Mondo Porno stage to “A tisket, a tasket, I lost my little basket.”

Source: Carnal Nation (http://clp.ly/1148C)

JF: Do you feel that art can and should be taught in a formal class-room setting?

MC: Formal classroom settings are great for some people. Myself, I learned better from bugging artists I admired until they shared their gessoing skills. I’m very opposed to the credentialization of art though. Study in an art school if it floats your boat, but the only piece of paper that should be getting you a job is the one with your drawing on it.

Josh Freydkis interviewing me on Saatchi Gallery’s blog.

My portrait of Amber Ray sold last night.

+ My portrait of Amber Ray is in Jason D’Aquino’s group show, Lead Poisoning, at Last Rites Gallery. It opens this Saturday in NYC

+ New article on Chinashop, “Confessions of a Yarn Bomber”, about a fascinating street artist I met in Amsterdam

Do you think art is a luxury or a necessity?

I think having luxuries is a necessity.

+ Becky Harper interviewed me for “30 Days of Drawing”

I spent today making sad and happy ladies on this pair of Etnies sneakers for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Party tomorrow. While I’m unsure about the durability of these babies, handpainted sneakers are pretty easy to DIY.

You need
*white leather sneakers
*acrylic paint in your desired colours
*a superfine sharpie
*(optional) a hot glue gun and some red velvet

For this pair, I painted a base coat of yellow on the fronts, red on the top part, and blue in the middle.  It might take two coats to get this even.  Then, I drew the basic shapes of the girl (red for the hair, beige for the skin), and the white for the bubbles.  Once this had dried, I went in with a find brush and added some highlights to the hair.  Finally, I grabbed my uber-fine sharpies and made all the swirly outlines and curlicues I so adore.  The velvet tongues are just scrap fabric and the hot glue gun.

Painted your sneakers?  Post them in the comments.

Rockstars Hilary Beck and Yuli Ziv were kind enough to cover my tshirt launch at Atrium.  Check out their writeups on…

+ Lookbooks

+ MyItThings

Damon Dash’s Karin + Raoul magazine did a four page spread on me, shot by one of my favorite collaberators, Aeric Meredith Goujon. We took over an abandoned church. Half these photos involved me clambering over beams in a pair of Louboutins, thinking I was about to die in a very exciting way. They were worth it.

You can read the article online HERE

We’ve got a new page of Puppet Makers, in which we meet our unlikely hero.  I too wish it would update more briskly than one page  a week, but them’s the breaks. Extra pages added.  Thanks Zuda!

Plus, the Art Monkey’s Ball got some sweet writeups that will cause you to vigorously kick yourself if you did not attend.. NY Press and Time Out New York, I adore you…

O’Shea: When you’re steampunking history as you are with this story, is there still an amount of research to be done on the front end? Do you or collaborator John Leavitt do the bulk of the research (or is the load shared)?

Crabapple: When you steampunk up a time period, you actually need to know more about it than if you were doing straight historical drama, because you have to know their design grammer and societal norms well enough to imagine how anachronistic tech would change them.

Last month, Valerie Dray shot me for her series on creative New Yorkers in French GQ.  Dray’s work is all lilac and light and evocativeness, and I loved every minute of posing for her.

I’m rocking dresses by ModCloth, Alexander McQueen and H&M, and the feather hairpiece of doom is by Amber Ray Accoutrements.

Thanks so much to Andrea Chalupa for this lovely profile of me on HuffPo!