A new face in the Riverwards art world, Rushawn “Scum Lizard” Stanley, hit the ground running in September when he moved to Kensington from Elmira, NY. Since then, he has taken his hand through unthinkably horrifying yet playfully colorful dimensions that confound the senses and send shockwaves of discomfort to interrupt thought. When I asked him about this at Franny Lou’s Porch, a favorite haunt where some of his art graces the wall, he confirmed that this is not at all accidental.

  “When I was a kid, I used to be the class clown; I used to like messing with people and I feel like that still holds true to this day, as an adult. I like looking at someone see something and going, ‘What? That doesn’t make any sense.’ There’s this feeling of joking around, of wanting to trip you up.”

  Trip you up his work certainly does. No matter how many pastels and primary colors are used, no matter what Seussian curves and bulges are given to these shapes, the effect is similar to watching a torture film with compelling aesthetics: that of wanting to look away but not being able to and staring with conflicted gaze.

  In spite of how literally bright it is, Rushawn considers his art to be “dark art” and for good reason. “I suffer from pretty bad depression, anxiety, a lot of bad stuff, and it’s really difficult to convey that, but those things aren’t what define who I am as a person. There’s a lot more to it than just that.You can tell somebody something but it won’t convey it properly, but with art you can convey that a lot better. I feel like what I draw and what I create is an attempt to describe these weird juxtapositions that I’m constantly feeling. Happy and sad, or these colors that don’t quite go together, or these things that don’t go together that you have to deal with every single day, all day.”

  To this reporter’s eye, it is precisely that struggle between play and fun, and discomfort and horror that powers the engine of his art, but there’s even more to it than that still. “I’ve really been getting into finding out about higher dimensions, things that don’t have to abide by our rules of what something should be. It’s just as alive, but not playing by the constraints of what we play by. When you kind of open your mind to say, ‘Well, wait, I can just do something from a whole other dimension,’ it allows you a lot more freedom to do whatever you want.”

  As far as materials go, he is a fan of Prisma markers, Micron pens and colored pencils. When it comes to methods, he’s long been doing what he would later find out was a favorite technique of Dali’s. “I do this style that pretty much was coined by Dali, the ‘paranoiac-critical’; you turn off your conscious mind, then draw under the impression that you are being controlled to draw.  After you’ve sufficiently drawn whatever it is that comes out from that, you then take your conscious mind and try to make sense out of whatever you just drew. It’s like the Google DeepDream where you have this fuzzy image and you tell it, ‘Try to find the animal,’ and it starts making something out of nothing.”

  A multi-talented fellow, Rushawn can be found playing and singing bluesy garage rock with gnarly guitar tones around the city under the name Scum Lizard. Scumlizard is also his handle on Instagram. •