Todd 'REAS' James Has a Thing for Witches and Boobs

Todd James, a.k.a. REAS, has a new art show opening tonight in Manhattan at Sandra Gering gallery. You should go. I’m going. Todd started out as a little graffiti urchin, and, like a lot of people, I first saw his work in Steve Powers’s book The Art of Getting Over. By the time he did the Street Market show at Deitch he was on a whole other level, and since then he’s been consistently widening the breadth of his techniques as an image maker and painter.

Todd James’s work seems to have come out of the most poetic juvenile-delinquent mind that has ever existed. Tits, rage, cats, cute things, and beautiful colors all bounce around on canvases that are beautifully composed and have transfixing color schemes. After admiring Todd’s work for about 15 years, I finally got to talk to him, and I can’t wait to see his show tonight.

VICE: One of the things I admire most about your career is how you started out in graffiti but ended up moving on to other media. Your more recent work has a lot of movement—it feels like you got used to painting with your whole arm instead of just your wrist.
Todd James: Thanks. I'm not still doing the same things, but certain things remain, somehow. I'm expanding on lifelong interests and adding on to them. I loved to draw then and still do.

Are you sick of talking about your graffiti past?
I like talking about graffiti sometimes, but more about other people's work

What's the significance of the title Supernatural?
For this show it kind of describes the content, which is inspired in part by fantasy art, heavy metal music, magic, and nature. I think I had the title in my back pocket for a while, and now it made sense.

Do you remember the action-figure line called Super Naturals?
I've never heard of the action figures, but the word is something I heard when I was young; I can't remember when. There was a great disco song called “Supernature,” by Cerrone, and the record cover is great—you should look it up. There’s an image of this guy, Cerrone, in early-80s-, 70s-gear in a doctor’s lab with these people in animal masks. It looks like something Devo might have used.

“Witch Mountain” and the “Minotaur” paintings look similar to a lot of your recent stuff, but the one of the face in the brick wall is moving into an interesting new level of rendering and paint application.
Yeah, I'm introducing some newer work here. Oil paintings with some rendering… the more comfortable I get, the looser I can get.

Maybe it's the boobs, but the painting of brick tits reminds me of some of Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nude paintings. Have you been thinking about him at all?
I imagine it's the nipples and tan lines because Tom Wesselmann has a lot of that going on, but I don't really think about his stuff. I'd say it's closer to Peter Saul and Philip Guston—he liked brick walls, and there are brick walls in so many classic graffiti pieces. That’s where my head’s at when I think about what inspired some of this.

Are you making a conscious decision to try new stuff, or do you just get bored with the old process?
I have been doing these for a few years, actually, and have shown a few here and there, but they have been kind of off the radar for the most part. I like doing new things and kind of slowly moving into new territory. The drawings for these are all pretty much the same sketched-out fast-line drawings. I’ve made some that are rendered versions of the gouache and graphite paintings on paper. I don't stop doing one thing and then move on; I just add something new to what I'm doing.

You've been posting a lot of really cool drawings of barbarian women on your Instagram. Does the barbarian girl have a name or a story context for you?
Doing those are what influenced the direction of this show. They're inspired by Frazetta, Vaughn Bode, and Bakshi. They are my old heroes. Sometimes you need to go back to early influences and they become new again.

I feel like I also see a Don Bluth influence—the guy who headed up a lot of Disney's animated features in the 70s, as well as the Space Ace and Dragon's Lair arcade games.
I'm more of a Bakshi fan, but I really liked those games when they came out. There was a good Disney movie called The Black Cauldron with cool designs in it. Sleeping Beauty is maybe the best of those Disney fantasy films—the designs in it are the best. I like all that dungeons-and-dragons fantasy stuff.

Is your painting “Witch Mountain” inspired by the Disney movie about kids with super powers?
Yes, Witch Mountain and Escape to Witch Mountain—the psychic twins, and there was a flying saucer or something, too. Yes, that’s the source.

How long does it take to make a piece like “Witch Mountain”? Tell me about your process.
I do drawings; then I paint them. The drawing can take the longest time, and just deciding what’s going to get put in or not used. I usually have a bunch going at once. The time can vary—some can be finished super fast, while others take a long time. Sometimes something just doesn't feel done, and I need time to find whatever it needs to be finished.

Supernatural's opening reception is Thursday from 6 to 8 PM at Sandra Gering Inc., 14 East 63rd St., Manhattan.

For more info on the show, click here.

Check out Todd’s site, here.