Artist and Monkey Maker Abby Manock fills the interior covers of our first issue with art instead of advertisements.
Readers of the premiere issue of Take likely noticed something different as soon as they opened the cover: Instead of advertising, the inside front and back covers featured art. Specifically the art of Abby Manock.
We asked Manock about this drawing in particular (the same art is featured for both covers) and the style in general. “That drawing part of an ongoing series [whose] style is an additive style,” she says. “I start usually with some sort of animal shape. Then I start repeating it and filling in other elements behind it. I guess I think of the paper as this infinite thing.”
Photo by Jacob Silco
It’s the kind of drawing, she says, that she does between projects. “That white paper is the scariest part,” she says. “If I can just start with the dumbest animal shape, then it gets me. Once I have that motif that I do once, it’s not as scary to keep doing it,” she says of the 6” x 6” paper on which she creates these drawings. “I try to pack that square with as much as I can.
“Then I do another one. It gets me going,” she continues. “There’s no meaning or narrative. It’s that in-between thing. I’m drawing in between flat space on the paper. But I think of it as infinity stacking.”
Photo by Jacob Silco
The bear featured in the Take cover piece is an icon she’s been creating for about 10 years. It is based on a Hopi bear figurine, a fetish that Manock’s dad gave her when she was a child. “It’s one of those things that just popped into my head.”
Manock does more, however, than drawings like the one featured in Take. When we speak, she is fine-tuning a performance art piece for a three-day Phish festival at Watkins Glen, New York. The music group funds art projects to debut at their shows, Manock says, noting she has been creating art for this festival for 12 years.
Photo by Jacob Silco
Called “Monkey Maker,” the interactive, experimental role play piece uses the iconic See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil monkeys — and a fourth monkey, Do No Evil — as a commentary on corporate bureaucracy, she says. “Monkey Maker is an exercise in working together, despite imposed handicaps, to literally make things happen.”