October 23, 2003
Artist puts whimsical twist on spooky holiday
Kipling West has dabbled in brain juice, converted a Margaret Thatcher puppet to a nun with boxing gloves and created a tarot deck just for cats. And right now her vision of the devil’s bathroom is on display at a store in Belltown.
Such is the life of an artist. By day she’s a mild-mannered program assistant in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, but after hours, well . . . . It’s no accident that the most recent show she’s curated is called Heaven and Hell.
“All artists,” West says firmly, “want the chance to portray devils.”
West herself is more eager than most, having been a fan of Halloween all her life. She speculates that’s because she grew up in New England, which she calls “Halloween central” for the United States.
“A lot of it has to do with the weather,” she explains. “You have these long brutal winters and hot muggy summers. Then you have six weeks of incredibly beautiful weather, but you’re also aware that everything is having its last hurrah before it all dies. And that’s when Halloween happens.”
Halloween for West is benign, however. She likes orange and black, scary scenes in the dark, but blood and gore are not for her. Her vision is more whimsical than macabre. That’s why, when she saw the dollhouse bathroom fixtures in orange ceramic with little black bats on them, she couldn’t resist. She bought them years ago, not knowing what she would do with them. But when she was thinking about what she would make for the Heaven and Hell exhibit, the little bathroom fixtures sprang instantly to mind. She decided to make a shadow box of the devil’s bathroom, complete with a view of Heaven out the window.
Heaven and Hell is on display now through January at Kuhlman’s, a men’s clothing store on First Avenue in Belltown. The retail space has high ceilings, West explains, and the exhibit is hung between the clothing racks and the ceiling.
“I’ve learned that restaurant and retail spaces are the best places to have an art exhibit, because most people don’t go to galleries,” West says. “But everybody goes shopping, everybody goes for coffee, everybody goes out to eat. A lot of times people are more likely to buy things in that environment because they’re intimidated by the gallery space.”
West has been curating such exhibits for a couple of years now — approaching the venue owner, lining up the artists and generally managing the show — all of it outside her regular working hours.
“I’ve discovered that if I have a job that’s art related, it kind of taints what I do at home,” she says. “I like to keep them completely separate. The last thing you want to do when you have an art job is come home and do art.”
An art job might be a little too mainstream for West anyway. She set her course long ago when she was accepted to two prestigious art schools — Parsons School of Design and the Rhode Island School of Design — then attended Parsons for a short time and dropped out. Classroom situations bore her, she says.
Art, on the other hand, is part of her life, regardless. The daughter of an artist, West says her mom placed a paintbrush in her hand when she was 10 months old and she hasn’t stopped drawing since. She was only 14 when she was first paid for her work — by a local magazine.
She has used her art on jobs she’s had, however — like the four years she spent at the infamous Archie McPhee’s. That’s where the punching nun and the brain juice come in.
“Mark Pahlow ’s genius was in taking stuff that already existed and changing it,” she says of the store’s owner. “So when he got a really great deal on a warehouse full of Maggie Thatcher punching dolls, he gave me one and said, ‘Make this into a nun.’”
Why a nun? Because nuns are hot sellers, West says. She went home and watched Sister Act so that she could copy the wimple and proceeded to make a prototype of the puppet, which was then sent off to a factory for mass production. The punching nun can still be found at Archie McPhee’s.
So can the brain juice pen. In this case the original product was called a coffee pen. It had a small globe on top containing brown liquid that bubbled when it came in contact with body heat. Pahlow wanted to use green liquid and call it brain juice.
“So we had this whole meeting in which we were talking about what kinds of brains they are and where did they come from and how did they get the juice out,” West explains. “We had to make up this crazy back story so we’d know how to package it.”
The group ended up deciding that there was a scientist in a lab distilling the brain juice, so that’s what West drew for the package.
Although working at Archie McPhee’s was a little on the crazy side, it had at least one serious result because it was one of her fellow staffers there who helped West get into book illustration. The friend was a writer who suggested West’s name to her publisher. West subsequently illustrated three baby books and The Amazing Fortune Telling Book, which included a deck of tarot cards. She also did a tarot deck just for cats.
West doesn’t read the cards, but she enjoyed creating the decks because it involved producing a unified set of images. She was less than pleased with the company she was working for, however.
“I was so fed up with layers of art directors and publishers and all these people stepping in, saying can you change this,” West says. “I started doing doodles on the edges of all my pictures and I would cut them off when I finished. Then the doodles took on a life of their own and became a total parody of what I was doing. So I put them together to make them cohesive and I sent them off on my own to U.S. Games, which is a huge tarot deck dealer. They called me the day they got it and said, ‘How soon can you get this out?’ So now I get royalties from that.”
Her parody deck was a Halloween deck, substituting the underworld for the world card and Frankenstein and bride for the emperor and empress. It also pictures a friend’s head in a jar and an ex-boyfriend as the King of Ghosts. Hey, art can be power sometimes.
But don’t expect West to step into a power suit anytime soon, in spite of her mother’s efforts in her behalf.
“I was named Katherine but always called Kip,” West explained. “Then when I was 7, my mother married a man who had a daughter named Catherine and who adopted me. So when they changed my last name they also changed my first name. They made it Kipling because, as my mother said, ‘Someday you might want to be dignified.’ And I’m still waiting.”
