Jeff Crouch is an amateur artist in Grand Prairie, Texas. He plays at art as though it were a game of hide and go seek. His graphic work has appeared in The Blue Smoke Band, ardent, moria, eratio postmodern poetry, Speculative Fiction Centre, JMWW, Quill and Ink, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Spoiled Ink, Lunatic Chameleon, Triplopia, Events Quarterly, Skive Magazine, Subtle Tea, Literary Vision Magazine (LitVision), Prose Toad, Lily, Ink Pot, Generator Press, Monkey Kettle, BluePrintReview, DogEar, Expose’d, Misanthropists Anonymous (with Molly Crouch), Above Ground Testing (with Molly Crouch), Dicey Brown, Unpleasant Event Schedule, The Dreaming Pool, Underground Window, and zafusy with more forthcoming in Ancient Heart Magazine, Neon Highway, Unlikely Stories, Bending Spoons, 63 Channels, Internet Fiction, The Aurora Review, Acton, Poems Niederngasse, Mad Hatter;s Review, Forklift Ohio, DISPATCH Literary Review, and edifice WRECKED.

1) First of all, tell me who is Jeff Crouch?

Jeff Crouch is a Hegelian experiment, a roadblock to heaven and a bounce back on the highway to hell. A three thousand pound puppet on a bungi cord dangling over a frozen water fall while shielding his eyes from the sun.

2) Your biography refers to you as a writer and an amateur artist.  Tell me about your artisitic work.

I am not a traveling circus. I have, however, written professionally. Yes, tech manuals. Not technical drawings. Me likes to take things apart, re-assemble them with string, and dangle the newfangled contraption as art. Digital makes destruction easy because virtual. Rye tin two. Until that day I sat on my scanner.

The graphic artist: I have always like art, and I always wanted to be a photographer, but not a photo-journalist so much as an experimenter. I think my family got a few of the Time-Life books on Photography when I was in my teens. What I liked was the freaky stuff: slow-motion milk drops, bullets in clay, color bleeds, works at the edge of realism and the pure abstract. ... . Distortion, contortion, enhancement. Later, the surrealist experiments in photography were what appealed to me, Man Ray especially. I always wanted a dark room, but I realized I would not be able to afford it. I had to wait until photography got cheap to pursue my experiments. So, digital became the route for me. Why? It's cheap. And outside cheap--probably because so much photography is simply blurry, lacking a subject, and ugly that I figured I should have fun with it. I decided art should be about dealing with the mundane rather than simply trying to escape the banal through the beautiful or hyper intense.Not that art should not seek out the beautiful and hyper intense, but that it should also come to terms with the drive to work, the dirty windshield, bad lighting, lack of focus, ... in a word, the un-consum-able. Yes, then there's art that forces the issue of transformation, i.e., what is being--this or that? (Illustrating Ovid or Kafka?) As for tools, essentially, I'm using the digital tools that came with my printers. High-end techniques that the more expensive digital tools allow are great, but so what? What can a magic marker drawing combined with a digital photo give me? What can a picture I draw and run through a scanner get me? Think cheap. Think cheap tricks. (Before graphic files became a means of internet attack, one interesting trick was to convert a JPEG to a Bitmap, open the Bitmap as text, run substitutions .. on the text, and then view the file ... (always was harder to do with a JPEG). Was the giraffe more interesting than the bush behind it? And what makes something interesting? I haven't made it to digital videography, nor to computer-generated or enhanced sound, not yet (a few experiments, but not enough yet), but these areas are open for exploration.

3)  I've noticed a great deal of your work on the internet, can you give me some information about what medium do you use. 

The common element in my approach to digital art and to digital literature is crossbreeding, mixing hypertext with poetry, mixing poetry with visual art, ... . Though its scope is traditionally more limited than the scope I have opened up, in literature, this mixing of modes, styles, genres, is called Mennipean satire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menippean_satire). Use the definition of Mennipean satire as an analogy to describe what I'm doing across genres--philosophy and pop with country, rap, and rock. Portmanteau is also a useful term in that it refers to blending (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau). Who chewed the chocolate in my coffee? My approach is not opera, but it's sometimes operatic in scope. What might be said of multimedia in line with interdisciplinary studies--what is it? That's the question in the re-making/mixing of one thing with another. The purport--to crelate meanspective. Bouncy bounce.

4)  What is your favourite means of expression

My children. They're not me, but they like to draw.

Jeff also gave an explanation of his work with the scanner:

I use the scanner to digitalize non-digital art.

 I use the scanner to take pictures. One issue here is the edge the scanner produces on an image--whether to use it or trim it.
Also, scanner noise and how to deal with it are other concerns. The scanner is quite good at producing "floats"--objects that float on top of other objects. The effect is that of looking up from under a glass floor.
I use the scanner to produce styles. The description on the _Poems Niederngasse_ site explains one way to produce style:

These  images are the result of a double process: the first part of the work required  sketching with magic marker--in a wide-open cartoon style--a set of images on  paper, the intermediate part of the work required scanning the images to digital  files, and the second part of the process required enhancing the scanned  images with digital tools. The goal of the second process was to create a "digital spray paint" effect and thereby give the images an energy different  from the energy of their cartoon style.

The Works of Jeff Crouch

More Works of Jeff

                                  Cezanne's Carrot

band Aids

                                                Moon Up

Call for Submissions

Pilot Magazine is receiving submissions for its upcoming literary journal Pilot Pocket Book 2.  The editors are looking for any and all literary work such as poems, prose, short stories, essays or excerpts from longer works.  If interested, you may submit your work as an email attachment to pilotbyow@hotmail.com.  For more information go to www.thepilotproject.ca.




Closing Words