HS: The tag line from a 2002 article in the New Times – “The work of lowbrow luminary Todd Schorr simultaneously savages and celebrates pop culture” – is an apt description. Does it resonate with you? What is the nugget you use to describe your work?

TS: I consider myself a cultural anthropologist and I use the signs and symbols of our time as a way of engaging the viewer in order to lead them into the various scenarios I’ve laid out in my paintings.

HS: Do you think that people are continuing a rather old conception of “low brow” and “outsider” art? What I mean by that is, has the moment passed given the amount of publicity and gallery space when those terms have any power?

TS: “Lowbrow” is a term that for whatever reason has caught on as a way to categorize the type of art I do. “Outsider” really does not apply to myself and many of my colleagues as most of us have all had some kind of formal art instruction and are thoroughly versed in art history and academic technique. True “outsider” art is created by individuals totally removed from any formal art training. I like to think of my work as picking up where the academic artists of the 1800’s left off, who devoted yards and yards of canvas to mythological and historical subjects, but I’m using the mythologies of our time. Basically as far as history is concerned, in the end it’s the individual artists that are remembered and not what category their art happened to be placed into.

HS: Not surprisingly, there is considerable intermingling between popular visual culture and erudite art. I think this especially relevant in how artists craft their visual language. Could you tell me a little about the stories you try and tell, and what underlying purpose builds in the body of your works?

TS: My visual language is very cartoon influenced but rendered in a realistic style. The content varies greatly from one painting to the next but I basically work within two categories. The first would be social commentary where I use cartoon forms in order to bring a heightened emotional charge to subjects I have an interest in such as mans place in the universe and human evolution. This can be seen in works like “The World We Live In” and “The Evolution of Superstition”. The other category is what I call my “Romantic-Historic Method” and this would be those paintings that serve more as historical records of our present day mythology. This would be the paintings that I mentioned before as being akin to the historical and mythological paintings of the 1800’s painted in a highly rendered technique, such as “Spectre of Cartoon Appeal” and most recently the huge 10’ x 12’ “Ape Worship” painting.

HS: What’s the first piece of visual culture that truly spoke to you? A cartoon? Comic? Magazine? Something that made you move towards art.

TS: My first brush with sustainable fantasy, that is, a world I totally believed in, was watching the 1933 film classic King Kong when I was four years old back in the 1950’s. It was that hazy, dreamy jungle, rife with sublime mystery that totally captured my developing imagination and continues to inspire me to this day. That film more than anything set me on the path to try to replicate my own private worlds of fantasy.