There’s a reason the Dig has published Allison Bamcat’s art more that once: because … well, we like it. Although versatile, Bamcat’s art generally consists of her signature drippy ice creams, wispy ghosts, cats, a thousand eyes, skulls and so on.
She creates a cartoon world of the fantastic and frightening by placing recognizable subjects in an unusual context whether it be a cupcake with skull frosting or a cat ghost eating a cookie. Eccentric much?
And who can forget her Gogo Fluff Deity at Space 242’s Freeky Friday Nights?
Allison invited me over for some wine and a good ole’ art chat. She took me for a house tour and I was able to check out almost her entire collection of work. My absolute favorite piece by Bamcat so far is definitely These Ghosts, They Know Me painted on an antique panel with her usual acryla gouache.
“That was one for the Boston collective show at the Linclon Arts Project, that was the same night as the freaky fright nights show. I had started on this one before.”
“This one actually started out as a napkin sketch at the bar at O’Leary’s and I used two napkins to sketch it out.”
“And went home, sketched it out again then traced it, scanned it, printed it out again, figured out the lighting for it on another piece of paper, then transferred it and painted it.”
“It kinda looks sad but it’s not. Its more supposed to represent that I have way too many ideas going on in my head all the time constantly. Some of them are good some of them are bad,”
“..you know, insecurities versus success and ideas like ‘I wanna have a fashion line’ or ‘I wanna go to a different country’ its too much stuff going on all at the same time. It’s kind of like madness.”
Parts of Allison’s apartment are actually like an organized collection of the wacky ideas that slipped out of her mind.
One corner in their living is room decorated with bottles, feathers, bones, and random figurines that caught me off guard. I don’t know what to call it but Allison and her boyfriend Rick lovingly refer to it as the “curiosity corner.”
“Rick and I like collecting antiques and going to road shows and when we went on vacation in may to Portland Maine we went to the museum of crypto zoology and saw a bunch of really rad stuff”
“Crypto zoology is like big foot and mermaids and the study of mythological kind of weird unexplained stuff so we just wanted to start collecting things from all over the place like we need more taxidermied animals and we’ve got some bottles and stuff.”
Not gonna lie, I kind of want a curiosity corner now.
In contrast with the eerie spirit of the curiosity corner, Allison’s brightly colored carousel horse is a newly finished painting.
“I had this idea in my head that I would do a series of carousel horses And still haven’t quite given up on it especially because I have the giant show piece carousel horse. So its just a matter of I need to stop being a lazy asshole and paint some more carousel horses.”
The giant show piece carousel horse is about 3 ½ to 4 feet across. It is an actual carousel horse made to fit on a merry-go-round and I can’t wait to see how she’s going to paint it!
One of the many pieces that blur the line between cute and creepy is Mr. Cupcake Kitty.
The bottom looks delicious and the top scares the shit out of me.
“It was just a sketch that I had started and I really liked having the oval canvas. I don’t know I never paint on canvas, I always paint on wood or board or something like that. I love getting like the antique panels.”
Allison will be participating in a craft fair at Mass Art called the Mass Market on December 11th
“ I’m doing a couple of craft shows. Which is in the mass art gymnasium. I’ve been going there every year since freshman year and obsessing with all the artists there and I figured that this year I was really going to take advantage of creating my own business.”
You can also see Bamcat’s work in an upcoming CVLT exhibit on December 5th.
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Great Article, congrats BAM