Chris Gilmour is a 29-year-old, West London-based artist, who, for nearly a year, has been posting Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes online. The site launched on May 1, 2007, with the goal that every day for one year he'd post images he'd drawn on Post-It notes of naked chicks. 472 naked chicks and nearly a year later, Gilmour has--well, he's posted a lot of naked chicks on Post-It notes. A while back, I linked to one of Gilmour's amazing twists on his Post-It naked chicks project: animated naked chicks on Post-It notes. (See above, and there are more here.) But at the time I didn't properly credit him, and so, not long ago, I found that Mr. Gilmour bore a grudge. So I sent him an email, the subject header of which was "let's make out." Chris seemingly forgave me, and then I asked him if he would let me interview him, and he said yes. Here, Gilmour answers my questions about naked chicks, Post-It notes, and how he fared on another project: the time he set out to shag 100 girls in a year. At the end, I've posted Gilmour's portrait of yours truly on a Post-It note. I may not be naked, but I do appear to be humping a rock. Thank you, Mr. Gilmour, for the interview and letting me post your awesome artwork here.
Reverse Cowgirl: Why Post-Its?
Chris Gilmour: I had a couple of pictures of naked women I'd drawn in the style of user manuals, and I wanted to sling them online. I just needed a neat name for the site. Pictures of Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes sounded great to me, but I think I stole the rhythm from a friend's band who were called Images of Mathematicians on Postage Stamps. It sounded good, so I stole a few blocks of Post-Its from work and started scribbling.
RC: Why naked chicks?
CG: I went through a phase of drawing pictures of cats on Flickr ages ago, but that was kind of boring. Woman are great, though. They have all these curves and shapes and bits and are all different sizes. I think the nudity was just a little bit of shock value. I tried drawing naked blokes, but it made me feel uncomfortable. I'm going to have to work on that in the future.
RC: Can you describe the process of animating naked chicks on Post-It notes?
CG: Most of the pictures on the site are drawn from porn sites, some I draw freehand, but most of the time what I scrawl looks nothing like it's supposed to, so I end up sticking the Post-It note to my laptop screen and just tracing it, and doing the shading or thickening up of the lines later. The tracing's really quick to do, and I figured I could just go frame-by-frame through a few seconds of a porno movie in just a few minutes. Luckily, I've got a high threshold for boredom. It takes ages to scan in all the pictures, but with Windows Movie Maker the animation bit is done in seconds. The music is just twee, indie and local bands, whatever's on iTunes when I'm drawing. Once I've got the tune, there's a bit of tweaking to get the music to tie in to the way the people are moving on screen. It's mostly hit and miss, but no one notices the misses.
RC: In theory, these are "just" Post-Its of naked chicks, but it seems they're about much more than that. About a lot of things. Love, sometimes. Loneliness, other times. Sometimes, just snatch. What was your intention when you started the project, and what did you learn from doing it?
CG: It's kind of evolved as I've been doing it. I wouldn't say a journey, just a long list of equally valid explanations.
Just some art project to improve my skills, releasing my creative urges, or a lowest common denominator attempt to build a site that gets thousands of hits a day, the wee squirt of self-esteem you get when a few hundred people look at something you've made, some kind of validation for going to so many porn sites, a last ditch attempt to impress/weasel my way into a feminist/art school ex-girlfriend, possibly some way to make money, the usefulness of having a hosepipe of web traffic to point at other sites and bands I like, or valiantly raising uploaded amateur pictures to the status of art.
I try not to think about the people I'm drawing too much. It feels a little creepy knowing back story: Rachel Aldana with the largest breasts in the UK and her terrifying underage appearance on a UK talk show, Vicky Vette's success breaking into the porn business at the age most performers are retiring, some random girl from Flickr whose photos went 'round the world for months before anyone noticed all the scars on her arm, once or twice when friends have sent me their own photos and I've never been able to look at them the same way since.
When I'm choosing what to draw, it's mostly aesthetic. I'll stumble across an image that's got good composition, or the model's got an interesting figure, but sometimes it's just trying to get balance in the spread of pictures, if I haven't drawn anyone scrawny recently or I've been focussing too much on breasts or bums.
In real life, I'm naturally really shy or a bullying jerk. All my feelings and emotions are dragged behind the tractor of ex-girlfriends. I think drawing is a bit of escapism. No emotional ties to the figures on screen. Crikey, maybe that's why I don't draw faces.
What I learnt from doing this for twelve months is that drawing is really easy, all women are beautiful and no website is going to help me get back the girl I lost. Only geography can help that. The site's pretty much reached the end of the road in what it can do for me.
RC: On the blog, you wrote that you tried to shag 100 girls in a year. Did you succeed?
CG: That's a whole other story from years ago. I think I managed five "conquests" before the heartache and rejection reminded me I'm not cut out for that sort of thing.
"The One of the Reverse Cowgirl" by Chris Gilmour
