20 minute read
how he deals with its challenges. Fnnch and the Honey Bears The what, why and— almost—who of the street artist behind a pandemic art treat
FNNCH AND THE HONEY BEARS
MEET FNNCH, THE ELUSIVE
artist behind the honey bear. Wearing a mask— he likes to keep his identity secret—fnnch (pronounced “finch”) discusses public art, the pandemic and helping others. From the February 25, 2021, “Michelle Meow Show” online program “Fnnch and the Honey Bears: Street Art for All.” FNNCH, Street Artist
MICHELLE MEOW, Producer and Host, “The
Michelle Meow Show,” KBCW/KPIX TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Co-Host
JOHN ZIPPERER, Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Co-Host
MICHELLE MEOW: He’s the anonymous artist behind the honey bears that you may have seen in San Francisco. Our guest today is fnnch, who creates street art and murals using multilayered stencils and spray paint. He calls his work contemporary pop art depicting objects from both nature and everyday life. So the little that we’ve uncovered from just basic Googling, I know that you came to San Francisco back in 2011 from St. Louis. Is that where you actually grew up? FNNCH: Yeah, I was there from birth till 18. MEOW: Tell us a bit about your journey to become a street artist. Were you into art as a kid? Did you always want to do this form of expression? How
—fnnch
did that come about? FNNCH: I feel like everybody is an artist when they’re a kid, and you get convinced that you’re not by society. I didn’t think I was going to be an artist, but there’s this famous quote from Steve Jobs. He said that you can’t connect the dots going forward; you can only connect the dots going back. So when I look at my life, I was like, “Oh, I kind of was an artsy kid.” My grade school had a competition where the St. Louis Symphony would put out a piece of music and then school children would have to interpret that. Then the school would send one person to the art museum in St. Louis. I went from my class for two years, which didn’t really mean much to me at the time, but maybe shows [I was] a little bit more artistic than somebody else.
I really was convinced like many other people that I wasn’t a very good artist, because I couldn’t draw very well. I still can’t draw very well. There were other kids in my class who could do better Spider-Man and Batman and whatnot. But I ended up getting back into it around the age of 14, because I had a friend that was sort of volunteering on a video game as a software engineer and I wanted to volunteer. I [said], “Well, what do you need?” They needed art. So I ended up getting into digital illustration.
The work I’m doing today is really the same work I was doing then, in some sense; it’s the same tools and the same general approach to illustration. I worked from photographs and things. Those skills were just built over that time, and they continue to be here. I’m just using them in a different way now. MEOW: Take us to the first honey bear, the inspiration behind the first one. Where was the first honey bear located? FNNCH: People think the honey bear was the first thing that [I] did. I think it’s the first thing that you heard of that I did. I was doing work for maybe six months, maybe a year before then. The very first work I did in the public space was in Dolores Park, and the city has painted these dog-walker stencils to show where your dogs are unleashed. I just took the dog and I swapped it out. They had like a lumpy German shepherd and I stuck in a poodle and thought it was funny. I ended up doing all the dogs in the park. I thought I would be “the dog guy.” So I started looking around for other dog walkers and other parks, and I just couldn’t find any, so then had to sort of branch out into other things and the honey bear came out. I wish there was a more lightning bolt-type moment.
I saw one; I found the image to be compelling. At that point, I was kind of just following whatever interested me. I didn’t have any aspirations of being a professional artist. Certainly it was just trying to engage in this form of expression in a way that I thought I could bring something to street art and bring something to San Francisco that I wasn’t really seeing. So I just painted it. The very first one was on a park wall in Noe Valley—I think it’s Elizabeth and 24th. It was a record for me. It was painted over by the city in three days, which was the fastest I’ve ever had anything painted over. As far as I know, I’m the only person I probably can tell who has done work illegally in a public park and had it be permitted to stay for many years.
I think the city sometimes thinks that I was commissioned to do these things or whoever’s maintaining the parks. It’s a testament to the fact that the work is not destructive, it’s intended to be additive. But Noe Valley likes to keep its neighborhood extremely clean. But in those three days there was a such a tremendous response to the work. I’d kind of walk by and just watch people. People were really engaged by it in a way that they hadn’t been maybe in my previous works. So then I was like, okay, maybe I should paint another one of these—sort of pulling that string. And then here we are, ZIPPERER: It’s kind of interesting. It sounds like it was almost a random choice of an image to do. And yet it’s one that people like. It makes them feel good. I don’t think people are looking at and thinking, “Oh, vandalism.” They look at that and they might think, “What does it mean?” or something; but it’s also a happy symbol of something. FNNCH: Yeah. I say that my art practice has two core tenets that I go for. One of them is to bring art to 95 percent of people that don’t go to art museums. The other is to change people’s perceptions of public space. Because the honey bear is an image that people will like, I can then use it as a tool to get you to question things or accept things. You’re not saying this is vandalism on this mailbox and it should go away and there should be nothing on the mailbox. What you actually say is, “Oh, I like that. Well, why is it on a mailbox? Could a mailbox be canvas for art?” Maybe you should have a program with the postal service. There are mailboxes, utility boxes, or on our garages—you know, whatever. Oftentimes the medium is what I’m experimenting with, trying to put art into new places and get people to view public space in a different way. So having such a happy, positive image is just a tool to accomplish that. MEOW: I too struggled with this thought, just coming across the honey bears, but then doing some more research about you. There’s a difference between vandalism and art. I was trying to even have that argument with myself, but you did bring up the fact that San Francisco has or had a pretty strict policy around street art or what you could do in terms of public space, private space. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and what you brought up in your campaign to say what we can do in public, in private spaces when it comes to art? FNNCH: Yeah. I think that there was the big backlash against graffiti, and they threw out the baby with the bath water to some degree. I’m not a big fan of most graffiti; I think some people who do graffiti are trying to make art, and I would just call them street artists, even if they call themselves graffiti writers. But I think other people are just trying to destroy things, and they make the community worse to be in. So in an effort to clamp down on that, [the city] really got serious about there not being anything anywhere. To me, the difference between street art and graffiti is
one of intentionality. If you think that you are making art, if you are trying to make art, if you’re thinking about what the person who is observing this is feeling and thinking—as far as I’m concerned, you’re a street artist.
There’s lots of places where this manifests. They paint over all the utility boxes every single day, or at least they used to. And so if something goes up at midnight, then it’s gone by noon the next day. San Francisco has special language in its definition of graffiti that is different from California as a whole. Certainly America. [It] says that graffiti [is] a mark that is drawn or painted or edged or inscribed. Then there’s also this language that is affixed or applied.
All of a sudden [it] starts to cover wheat paste, which is a very nondisruptive form of street art, where you basically apply artwork on paper, but with wheat paste. And it counts stickers, which is artwork potentially that is held on with an adhesive. All of a sudden now you’ve taken something from an infraction— or you get a ticket if you’re caught doing it—to a misdemeanor, and damages are great enough—it takes it to a felony and just seems completely absurd to me. Sticker art is one of the many forms of culture that I appreciate. I feel like it will be okay if the poles that hold up the no parking signs—like, you can just let those go. It’s going to be fine. Like you’re going to put stickers on them, they’ll pile up. You know, society is not going to crumble. It’s going to actually allow people to come into art and into public art in this really accessible way.
I’m not painting murals that are 50 feet tall; not everyone has the capability to do that, can get together the funds to do that, can get permission to do that. But really anybody, even a very young child, can take a little sticker and draw something with a Sharpie and put it up in a public space. And I think that is something we should encourage. ZIPPERER: In all of your projects or each time you’ve gone out and done this, have you ever been stopped? Have you ever almost been stopped, been caught, ever been fined? FNNCH: No, I’ve never been detained, arrested. I’ve occasionally had conversations with residents while I’m doing work, mostly positive in nature.
Maybe this is just a fun story to tell. I used to go out super-late at night, like four in the morning, to do the work. I don’t like being up that late. So I was like, okay, I’ll start [doing it earlier]. At one point—this is still when I was doing the dog-walker pieces—I had this idea of doing a Picasso dog. Picasso did the series of one-line paintings, or one stroke.
I have a spotter at this point, who’s kind of watching out. I’m painting. My spotter’s like “Somebody’s coming.” At this point, I’m sort of committed. I’ve come too far. I had all these trash bags I’d lay out to make sure I didn’t over-spray the sample. I was like, 30 seconds, I was like, paint, paint, paint, paint, paint, 15 seconds, pull [up the bags]. I pop up. And this person is right in front of me. I’ve been fearing this moment for a while. I’m thinking they’re going to tackle me and call for citizens arrest, and hold me down while some other neighbor calls the cops. I didn’t know what to do. I just said “Picasso.” And the guy was like, “Awesome!” And then he just walked around me and walked away.
This is this moment that I’ve been building in my head; the reality of it is that people by and large like the work that I do and people by and large want to live in a city that has street art. People don’t want to live in a city where people are wanting me to destroy private and public property. People don’t want to run a city where things are being defaced. But people do live in a city where arts and culture kind of exists in these fringy spaces. I think that’s part of the cool of a city like San Francisco and people don’t want to lose that. So there’s a lot more public support for this.
I think people, even though I define street art as being illegal public art, I think it’s a mural or some other form of expression if it is permitted. The work I do is of that variety. I think we think of San Francisco, [and] we’ll be sad if there weren’t people who are going out and doing that kind of work. MEOW: I liked what you said in an interview, which is part of the work that you do is to let people know that it’s okay to be happy. For I
guess the last few years that I’d been in San Francisco, even if you felt happy, you felt anguish for a lot of reasons, maybe political reasons, maybe all this stuff that we were going through. But I admit seeing the honey bears or seeing your [other] artwork really did make me happy.
Let’s segue to you being anonymous and the decision to do so. You were telling the story about someone potentially turning you in. Why be anonymous? Is it because youre using public spaces? FNNCH: When I started, every single piece was illegal. All 2013, all 2014 or 2015. Signing my legal name to it just didn’t seem like a reasonable idea. Some people do that. There’s an artist named Jeremy Novy who’s sort of famous for the koi fish on the sidewalk. He’s sort of like the godfather of San Francisco street art. He signs it with his name. I think that’s bold and brave and cool. But I kinda want to keep my head down. What ends up happening is it’s just pathdependent at that point. You can only take the mask off once; once there’s one photo on the internet, then that’s it. Now I like it for option value. I didn’t think I’d get back and do street art in San Francisco, and then I did last year in a really major way. So here I am, again doing work that’s not legal.
Also, you know, there are people who both really liked my work and people who really don’t like my work and I don’t necessarily want to be randomly interacting with either of those camps, if I can be honest. I’m happy to interact with people through social media or through email or art shows. But there’s times when I kind of want to putz around and do my thing, nor do I want someone who doesn’t like my work to come up to me and express that in their own way.
So it seems like it’s working for now; I don’t think it’s going to work forever. More reasons as to why will emerge in the arc of time, but at some point it’s not gonna work anymore and then that’ll be that. ZIPPERER: One of our viewers writes, “The honey bears have made my year.” You talked about doing these on the boardedup buildings. I suppose in cities across the country this [has] happened, but San Francisco being such a dense city where a lot of your life is lived outside of your tiny apartment, you’re seeing your commercial corridors, your downtown just within a matter of a couple of weeks [go] from looking like normal places to [looking like] they’re protections against riots or something. Of course you, you did one on the front of The Commonwealth Club. [See photo above— Ed.] We had already contracted with another painter to do a BLM image, which he has covered it up with. So our apologies, but we took photos of it because we thought it was really cool. But it’s been neat to see that some of these businesses have put plexiglass over your honey bears to protect them. That’s got to make you feel good.
How long does it take you to do one? Not one of the giant ones, but one of these oneoffs in front of a business. FNNCH: When I got started, all the work I was doing was stencil-based. It was all spray painted, and that was really quite labor-intensive. I spent all of 2015 painting them on mailboxes, and I did develop many techniques and tricks to not get caught doing it, but I’d go out for about three hours; I do about five of them. I would pass the same location multiple times [to] add all the layers. I had come up in Los Angeles; there’s a lot more of a culture there of street art, so people are much more likely to pass information between each other. We’ve definitely seen a really big resurgence in San Francisco, so this is much more prevalent now; but back in 2013, there weren’t a lot of people doing
—fnnch
work necessarily.
So I didn’t even know about wheat paste really until I think I started doing it maybe two years ago. Now that I know about it, [some of] those go up in about 45 seconds. They’re made in advance on paper and you just take this wallpaper paste and paste it on the wall. You put a thing up, you paste over it, you smooth it out to [remove] all the bubbles and then you’re gone. That really allowed me to take this work much broader. And I was sort of in a position when the pandemic hit, where there’s some amount of work to prep. [I might in advance make] 50 of them. And then three times a week, I would go out, just boom, boom, boom—I put them up. So I was sort of in the right position, with where my work was, sort of develop enough to do something compelling and prepared enough to take advantage of the explosion of canvas that we had. MEOW: Speaking of the pandemic, in San Francisco—and all of our cities around the country—the restaurants have suffered greatly, closing people out of work or our nightlife, our culture, definitely very negatively impacted. But the honey bears did do something during the pandemic to help a little bit. Can we talk about that? FNNCH: I started doing those bears in those masks and I didn’t think anyone was going to want to remember this time. I thought I’ll have like a collection like we have the before times and the after times, we don’t talk about the in-between. But people started asking me, “Hey, can I buy one?” How I make a living is I paint paintings, typically onto wood. I’m like, well, it just wouldn’t feel at all good to sell them and not somehow use this as an opportunity to raise money for good causes. That was part of it.
The other part of that were these masks. I have a collaborator named Stockhausen. I go into the studio early on and he’s selling masks. This is back when you couldn’t get masks. And if he could get them, they certainly were not attractive. He has a background in fashion design and was making what I thought were very comfortable, fashionable, and actually quite effective masks. [Indicates the mask he is wearing.] This one has a removable filter. This was when it was illegal to buy an N 95. There’s all this research going on about folding towels and sewing them and all these engineers trying to figure out, well, how do we do global things? So I was like, Hey, if I just put honey bear fabric on that, could we sell them for charity? And so that was the first fundraiser I did.
The [sales] went a hundred percent to charity and then the paintings, half of all the sales I did went to charity. I did the [50–50 split] because I have employees to support and payroll and rent and all these things. So that feels like a sustainable number and that was way better than I could have expected. I think the very first fundraiser I donated over $100,000. In my mind, I still don’t really know how to understand it, because only 1 percent of artists actually earn $100,000 in a year. So to donate that much became an amount where I was like, “Holy smokes!” So that first fundraiser will be targeted to different nonprofits, both highly focused on local, what’s called the safety net fund, just doing direct cash transfers to artists and performance artists out of work. [We payed] restaurants to make food and then giving that [food] through community groups to those in need. So that supports the restaurants and it supports those in need and also put the community groups in position to do what they do best, which is try to figure how to help their community. I had done philanthropic work in previous years; I did a Smokey Bear raising funds for victims of the wildfires. I did the pink hat bear for Planned Parenthood when Trump cut their budget some number of years ago. But really this is a different kind of a scale.
So I ended up being like, “Well, that works.” I ended up doing like a sequel to that, and then I ended up targeting other fundraising—Black Lives Matter causes, and I did one for the LGBT Center. I did one for St Anthony’s, which serves up 2,500 meals a day to those in need. So, yeah, this is becoming a really core part of my practice. I’m having conversations with different people right now, trying to figure out how to do this to the best of my ability. It’s very challenging in some ways; the more you give, the more people come to you asking for things, and [I’m] trying to balance my own priorities and my studio. I feel like the flexibility of the bear as an image makes it actually really ideal for this sort of work, much more ideal than a lot of other artists’ work might be. So I’m in this sort of unusual position. I believe I have a better opportunity than most to do this sort of work. Therefore I don’t want to reject that as a proposition.
Stay tuned for more fundraisers. I have the next one planned. ZIPPERER: One of our audience members asks, “How can we buy more honey bear face masks?” Are they still available? And if so, where would people go? FNNCH: Unfortunately not. It turns out that sewing masks is not core to what I want to do with my life. We ended up doing a second release, and actually one of the really cool things is somebody wore one on the Florida town hall with Joe Biden. So it was on national TV and now our president has seen a honey bear, at least from a distance. We hired an out-of-work artist to sew, and she kind of worked full-time on it for a month or two. And she had schoolwork to get back to and our interest just wasn’t there, honestly, running a cut-and-sew facility in the middle of San Francisco. It was just not what I wanted to do.
We didn’t make that many in total. I think we made maybe 300, 400. But all the money went to charity, and in the second batch we paid for her wages and the materials and then all the rest to the charity. We were selling them for over $100, because I’m like, this is really a donation you’re making and we’re giving you a mask as a thank you.
