by MATTHEW HAYS

The marvelous metal band Iron Maiden once inquired, in song form, “Can I play with madness?” The answer, according to Toronto artist Derrick Hodgson, is a resounding yes.

“The world is mad, it’s a mad place,” says Hodgson. “I see the goodness in it—don’t get me wrong, I love life, I’m not bashing it, but it’s a very bizarre trip. And it’s getting more bizarre as I get older and interact with more people on a larger level.”

In this mad world, up is sometimes down, right is wrong (or left), and the shaggy-haired, shitkicking country boy is an unlikely icon of a tech-heavy, hypermodern downtown zeitgeist.

To be fair, Hodgson’s awkward shoehorning into the continuum of current kid culture is largely of his own making, intentional or otherwise. His multifaceted art connects to the distinctly urban nodes of graffiti, digital animation, skateboard stickers and vinyl toys for grown-ups. Oh, there’s also book publishing (his collection My Mania: The Art of Derrick Hodgson is out now) and gallery shows of his paintings (his latest is Repeat If Necessary at Montreal’s Madame Edgar).

Even Madreal, the name attached to his Web site and commercial-art studio, invites assumptions of citizenship in the hip hop nation. Taken from a random lyric off a DJ Krush album, Madreal has occasionally been misconstrued as the 32-year-old artist’s nom de guerre. “I find it really amusing that it’s become my moniker. It was only ever supposed to be my place on the worldwide Web.”

Not that the name isn’t relevant. “My view of the world is one of complete madness, and the reality is that I see it that way and draw it that way. It kind of works for the way I see what I’m doing. That’s why it was chosen. It wasn’t to be all hip hop and down. I’m not. I’m a country kid from north of Toronto. I wear flip-flops and Wallabies, I’m not the sneaker guy.”

Derrick doodles dandy

Hodgson grew up in Kettleby, Ontario, 45 minutes north of Toronto—close enough to sustain a connection to city life, where he connected tangentially with the graffiti scene, but remote enough to keep his feet on the ground and dirt between his toes.

He benefitted from a family that supported his creative inclinations and encouraged their different facets. His older brother kept him well stocked with the underground head comics and psychedelic hippie graphics he so loved, as well as an ample supply of the Mad Magazine margin cartoons by one of his heroes and obvious inspirations, Sergio Aragonés.

His mother, an art teacher for home-schooled kids who would give him napkins to doodle on in church, brought him what he calls a folky and intuitive sense. His father, a civil engineer with drafting skills and the gear to match, prompted a contrasting technical side.

“I really got into saving my money and buying that perfect Staedler technical pen, and having all the good little templates. I loved when I used to get new G.I. Joe stuff. All the little drawings inside to put them together—they were almost like little blueprints. So I definitely have that rigid side to me. I think that with a lot of my art right now, I’m trying to blow a lot of that apart. Trying to be intuitive with the line and being happy with how I drew it, realizing that the way my hand naturally scribed the line has stylistic presence, that it has my identity attached to it.”

The flow of creative energy from his hand, through the pen to the paper is at the core of everything Hodgson does. It all pours forth from split-second scribbles in his sketchbook. “That’s what I am, a doodlebug, really.”

As off the cuff and in the moment as his drawings may be, when he spins them out into his noisy, vibrant paintings, things become what Hodgson calls “process-heavy.”

“I scan the lines into the computer, clean them up—a bit—then output those, burning silkscreens and then reapplying them in a different way. Every screen I make, I keep until it’s totally demolished. I fill them with characters and watch as, over time, the emulsion wears down and, all of the sudden, you get textures to the lines that have a heavy graphic quality. I’ve got all my older screens on which the characters and lines are starting to degrade. I use that as background stuff, to show that those characters are still there, but they’re fading away, and here comes the new breed. So it’s this constant growth of new characters.”

Farm team

Confirmation of Hodgson’s agrarian outlook lies in his principle of character farming—“Basically, I’m planting little crops of characters.

“I scan in all these drawings, build up all my characters and categorize them, so it’s like building little seed banks. I’m always going to them, using one or two to start my images which are basically big crops of characters. Every time I develop a new character that I feel is where I want it to be, that I’ll want to use over and over again, I’ll just put him in the seed bank. Then, when I go to build these compositional montages, it’s just like going into the back of the utility shed, filling the seed drill with a bunch of my lines and then going out and building a crop and seeing where it goes. Each show I do is like a new season, a new harvest.

“I’ll push it even further—you’ll see a lot of stuff in the show that’s all about spores and sprouts and the planting of ideas.”

Of course, you reap what you sow. Thus, Hodgson’s initial “gardening” gestures—graffiti, stickers, graphics in the right cool spots—have sprouted and borne fruit. It’s a fairly direct line. The graf and such led to some magazine interviews, one of which caught him musing about how he’d like to work with some noted dub reggae musicians.

“Basically, a dub is, they build the vocal track, then they take whatever is in there and run it through a bunch of electronics, peel things out and bend things back. It’s very much like how I look at my creative process.”

The offhand remark in print led to a stunning phone call, an offer to collaborate with a friend on an animation to go with a track by dub don the Scientist. That in turn led to a call from California-based agency Thunderbirds, a group of young Japanese tasked with finding suitable artists for Sony’s Art Capsule vinyl-figure series, which saw his characters, entitled Creatures of Mass Mania, next to those of James Jarvis, Charles Burns and Parisian graffiteuse Fafi.

Figures of speech

The deadline was a mere month, but Hodgson was up to it. “I already had these six characters set up. They were pretty much my staples. Jim Stickney was one, then the Granny, Space Ape, Mania Boy, the Zombie Scout and Mogo. Each one represents a dysfunctional aspect of society, as seen by me. The Granny—she’s the idea of how our parents’ post-WWII generation won the war and started consuming without thinking about it, and it’s our generation and beyond that will be dealing with that. Jim Stickney’s the classic suburban latchkey kid, wasted on Ritalin, media-gorged, being raised in this wasteland.

“At the end of the day, I am a bit of a hippie. Does the world need another little piece of plastic floating around nonsensically? Well, maybe, if I can put my political statement to it. I mean, I was going to do the project regardless, but this is how I dealt with whether it was enviro or not. I didn’t feel super guilty about it because they’re not being bought to be thrown away. They will hang around people’s places for a while. So I looked at it as a fun way to take my subversive little political ideas and infiltrate people without them knowing.”

Funny thing is, Hodgson’s ideas ultimately spill out not as statements but as questions. “I grew up in a pretty agrarian community. Everyone’s pretty salt of the earth, for the most part. Coming to the city, you see how people get so disconnected from anything that’s real. Everything’s masked under our daily activities. Even me! What the fuck do I do? I just sit and doodle for consumer goods. It’s an enjoyable thing, for me and for other people, but at the end of the day, really, what the hell is it all about? That’s the grand mystery, the big what.”

Repeat If Necessary is at Madame Edgar from Friday, Jan. 13 to Monday, Feb. 20. Vernissage on Friday, Jan. 13, 6 p.m.

>> Arts Listings