Q & A with artist Max Carr (@8millionfaces)

 

Similar to the Rockstar artist and Tortured artist tropes, the Artist-as-Misanthrope stereotype is a little tired. Nothing embodies the opposite of hermetically sealing yourself in your studio away from civilization more than the street fashion photographer, the caricature artist, and the plein air portrait illustrator (I'm still workshopping that term). I've been following @8millionfaces on Instagram for a while now, and the quick street portraits of random folks have done much to grow my empathy for complete strangers. As social media works so hard to divide and disconnect us from our fellow humans, artists like Max Carr are presenting a pure vision of humanity — devoid of politics, proselytizing, and comment sections. People. Existing. It's novel and necessary. I reached out to Max to learn more about his practice and motivations. Enjoy.

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A recent Minnesota transplant, Max Carr is an architect at HGA and an artist living in South Minneapolis. After growing up in Kansas, Max went to architecture school in Milwaukee, lived and worked in New York for most of his career, and eventually landed in Minneapolis three years ago with his wife Maura, who is also an architect, and their young daughter. For the past 8 years, he has kept an almost daily practice of documenting strangers, friends, neighbors, and fellow commuters in the fleeting moments stolen from the chaos of modern life in the city — first in NYC, and now here in the Twin Cities. He calls this ongoing project “8 Million Faces.”

 

Blaine Garrett: How did you get your start in the visual arts?

MC: You know, I’ve never taken any formal training as an artist, though I recently took a weeklong drawing workshop with my wife Maura. I have been drawing and doodling, though, for as long as I can remember, and I owe most of that to my mom, who always seemed to be drawing, painting, or making something. As a young kid, I would sit in my grandparents’ kitchen for hours on end and create my best impressions of Star Wars characters, Kansas Jayhawks (LOTS of those… nowadays I’m probably even more interested in The Jayhawks), and what I envisioned as the ideal house — complete with a three-story slide into a ball pit. In retrospect, those were the first building sections I ever drew. Is it any wonder I ended up being an architect? As an architect, I am a visual thinker, and putting pen to paper is natural and a primary mode of communication.

8 Million Faces, Vol. II: NYC Spring 2020

 

BG: Could you tell us more about the 8 Million Faces project?

MC: After I moved from the Midwest to New York, the city — and the subway in particular — became an infinite source of fascination. Every person glimpsed on the street or on the train had a story waiting to be told. More likely than not, I would never see them again. Back then, I would occasionally take out my sketchbook and start drawing someone who caught my eye. By 2015, I picked up the pace, aiming to draw at least one person in my little pocket-sized sketchbook every day of my commute. Most of my drawings might seem to exist in a vacuum — each is usually pretty quick and of a single person from the torso up, with no context… but as a whole, I think they really capture moments in time and space. Flipping through my sketchbooks, you can see the seasons change — the jackets and the hats come out first, then the scarves and the parkas. There was also an obvious shift in early 2020. At first it was gradual, with a person here or there in January wearing a mask on the train. And then in March… well, we all know what happened. At that point, I stopped riding the subway and started drawing from walks to Prospect Park and around our Brooklyn neighborhood. I even sketched from a few photos for the first time… Zoom portraits would appear a bit later.

After getting settled in the Twin Cities, it took time to shift gears and keep it up. Ultimately, I found new places to sketch… stop lights, restaurants, the light rail, roadside by the lakes. I’m also starting to come out of my shell a little more. On the subway, it was a very anonymous exercise. I think only once or twice did anyone notice that I was sketching them. Part of that was certainly a function of everyone being so absorbed in their phones. But I was also observing life on very crowded cars, and there was a lot more interesting stuff going on than a guy with a pen. Lately, with my wife’s encouragement, I’ve begun to rip the completed drawings out of my sketchbook and give them to the people I draw. I’ve also been drawn to capturing people in their place of work, especially those in the service industry.

Each sketch captures some marker of individuality. If you ever see the person I’m drawing and compare them to my sketch, they might only bear a passing resemblance, but I’d like to think that I have captured some of their essence and uniqueness. The project has evolved since it began — where and how I sketch, gradually adding more detail and color, etc. But at its core, it is a ritual — an exercise in being present, in observing and engaging with my surroundings. 

 

8 Million Faces, Vol. IV: Minnesota Winter

 

BG: How long have you been in the Twin Cities, and how have you been enjoying it so far? What surprised you?

MC: We moved here in the Summer of 2020, and I won’t sugarcoat it — the beginning was rough. If anyone were to ask, I probably wouldn’t recommend moving to a city you’ve never lived in during a pandemic that’s keeping everyone locked at home, unable to make new friends. That said, we relocated to be close to my sister-in-law and her family, and that has been great — especially for our daughter. We also lucked into a great neighborhood and have become friends with several really awesome families with young kids.

After we moved through the initial period of social isolation, we started to see how much there is to love about the Twin Cities. For starters, the parks and the lakes are amazing, and they were such an oasis in our first year here. The arts and music scene is spectacular. The Current was another huge lifeline after we moved here, and there are so many great music venues, large and small. We haven’t yet made it to First Ave, but have really enjoyed “discovering” places like the Palace and State Theatres, the Armory, Hook and Ladder, and the Lake Harriet Bandshell, which boasts free concerts several nights a week all summer. How great is that?!

Maybe the biggest surprise here is… the pizza. Coming from Brooklyn, we were told by a friend who lived here a dozen or so years ago, that while the food scene here was phenomenal, we’d be sorely disappointed in the pizza options. Something must have changed since then, because there seems to be an embarrassment of riches now. 

 

Progress Images, 6/27/23

 

BG: What inspires you to draw people?
MC: Well… as an architect, I suppose I should be drawn to buildings. And don’t get me wrong — I am! Some of my fondest memories from architecture school were sketching significant buildings and street scenes on a study abroad. For me, wandering around a city and drawing architecture can be very antisocial — I’ll find a spot out of the way and get tunnel vision. People, though, are so much more interesting… they’re constantly moving and changing, and providing feedback — whether directly or intrinsically. It takes a ton of patience to sit down and draw a building or a cityscape, but drawing people on the spot when you only have anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes… I like the challenge of it. I do all of my sketchbook portraits in ink, and there’s something liberating about just going with my first impressions and not being able to go back and second-guess and overwork things. Full disclosure, though, I always tell people I love hats, glasses, beards and scarves, as they can cover up a lot of mistakes :)

BG: You recently had work at the Minneapolis/St.Paul International Airport as part of the Arts@MSP exhibition series. Could you tell us a little bit about that and how that came to be?
MC: My wife Maura was working at the Airport, and Arts@MSP holds an annual exhibition called MSP Creates, which is a show open to airport employees, retirees, volunteers and family members. Our entire family entered work for the exhibition — even our daughter. It was a lot of fun to see the breadth of talent on display just within that subset of the MSP population. Beyond that show, though, Arts@MSP is also doing really great programming of arts and music.

 

Work in Progress, 2015 - 2023

 

BG: Who are some of the artists that have inspired your process along the way?
MC: Early on in the 8 million faces project, there were a couple of key influences. Most directly, I was inspired by an artist named Lauren Simkin Berke. They set up a booth, Lucy-from-Peanuts style, at an art fair in Brooklyn. For a dollar, they would draw a portrait for anyone willing to wait in what turned into a very long line. The next day, I committed to drawing as often as I could. I was also (and continue to be) inspired by street art, in all its glorious and strange forms. My work might not bear any resemblance to some of my favorite artists — Swoon, Robots Will Kill, Michael Alan — but their work definitely took up a fair amount of real estate in my head when I was starting out. I have also been influenced by the Free Art movement, and had a lot of fun dropping original sketches around NYC (and on one occasion, Kansas City) for “Free Art Fridays.”

Beyond that, I have drawn inspiration from several kindred spirits along the way, whether they knew it or not. Among them are two of my friends and former colleagues from FXCollaborative Architects: Carol Hsiung and Leon Kravchenko, both prolific subway sketchers working in very different styles. There’s Chris Russell, who does these beautiful, organic composite drawings of people on the subway, as well as a very cool series of “subway ghosts” — people drawn on transparencies, with the drawings then photographed in a real-life situation. Gavin Snider, a fellow Kansan who now lives in New York, does fantastic work in watercolors. He’s the antithesis of the antisocial urban sketcher I described earlier — it’s worth reading the captions of his Instagram posts, where he relays the interactions he has while painting the city. Shantell Martin once gave a talk at FXCollaborative, and I am inspired by her approach to self-expression and seeing everything as a potential canvas. Finally, though I unfortunately never had the chance to meet him before he passed away, I love the work of Jason Polan, a compulsive drawer and observer of city life, with a singular, offbea,t and hilarious way of looking at the world. 

Since we moved here, I have found no shortage of inspiration — from taking a walking tour of public art in Lowertown with the incomparable Ta-coumba T Aiken, to checking out the Art Shanty Projects at Lake Harriet for the first time this year, to the wealth of street art and murals around the Cities. I’ve also enjoyed becoming more familiar with and energized by several other local artists and designers. Just to name a handful… Seitu Jones, Marlena Myles, Jordan Hamilton, Leslie Barlow, and Stacey Combs, whose work I first encountered when I ordered a Coloring Book for a Cause in the pandemic’s early days.

 

Sociable Cider Werks, 6/8/23, Lyndale and Lake, 6/8/23

 

BG: How have your other skills and experiences influenced your artistic practice?

MC: When I was in architecture school, nobody ever warned me how much time I would spend a) on the phone and b) in spreadsheets. In reality, architecture was never going to involve spending days on end in a creative fever dream — it can be much more beautiful, social, complex, and frustrating than that! Still, there are muscles that you risk losing if you don’t exercise them regularly — and always keeping a sketchbook close at hand is a great way to combat that and to rediscover some of that magic that appealed to me in the first place… even if this week’s sketch only explores how to keep an HVAC duct above a ceiling. Before I really committed to drawing people on the subway, I spent a lot of time on my commutes sketching out ideas for projects at work. Eventually, though, I started looking up and seeing all the interesting people around me. So the sketchbooks stayed, but the subject matter shifted. In either case, though, I have this desire to find and foreground art in day-to-day life. Also, there is this direct line from eye to mind to hand to page. What you see, what you envision in your head… it might not end up coming out on paper the way you pictured it, but in working through the lines, you begin to see things that weren’t there when you first started looking. 

 

Outlaw Music Festival, 6/23/23, Hennepin and Lake, 5/10/23

 

BG: How can folks best support you and your practice right now?

MC: At this point, supporting my practice would mostly mean following along my journey on Instagram — the more, the merrier! Maybe you’ll even see yourself in one of the sketches… or at least a Bizarro version of you. I have created a handful of collages of my work — most recently of a composition of Minnesotans in Winter. These are available as signed prints, as are several original drawings. Commissioned sketches are also an option. Anyone interested, feel free to DM me on Instagram or email me at 8millionfaces@gmail.com.

BG: Thanks for taking the time to talk more about your practice with MPLSART.

MC: Absolutely! I was so excited when you reached out. MPLSART is indispensable for this community, and for me–it is providing a dizzying crash course in the depth and diversity of talent and brilliance thriving in my new hometown. So thank you. ◼︎

 

Self Portrait, 7/17/23

 

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This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.