I’ve known Chrissie for a year or two now and, in all that time, she has done nothing but giggle in between being very polite.  When I first met her I knew she made art and I guess I began to form a picture in my head of what it might look like based on the bubbly person before me.  Then I saw her actual artwork.  W’hwa?  I thought.  Chrissie made this?  I just couldn’t believe the work I was looking at came out of this fun-sized blond.  I expected cutsey illustration, but, instead, saw truly other-worldly works that had all the makings of an authentic Magical Mystery Tour guide fused with the protagonists from 70s knitwear pattern books and a couple of LOL cats.  In short, Chrissie has created a happy place in her works that are visually tight and exceedingly popular, so I had a little chat with her one day, and this is that chat:

Rhys Coren: Hello. However fantastic I believe it to be, your work is… well… it is some of the most psychedelic looking stuff I have ever seen. Are you a) an old hippy b) high as a kite on drugs c) insane?

Chrissie Abbott: d) all of the above

RC: No you aren’t, you’re normal and young and I have seldom even seen you proper drunk let alone on acid. This art you make, it comes from your head… just your head! Actually, is that what it is like in your head?

CA: Haha OK. I think the stuff I make is all relevant to stuff I’ve done and seen. My parents could have definitely been described as hippies and the stuff they were into has naturally filtered into my own consciousness. My mum was really into alternative ways of healing and meditation and crystals and all that jazz. My dad did crazy road trips across America wearing kaftans. Also, growing up in the early 80s, kids’ TV was like the trippiest thing you could imagine, and as a child you are essentially a sponge. Sesame Street and Willow the Wisp were my favourites. I think my head is a pot that contains the soup of all the different experiences and people and things I’ve seen and I filter it out into the artwork I make. I may not be on acid 24/7 but everyday life can be pretty psychedelic.

RC: EVERYDAY LIFE IS PRETTY PSYCHEDELIC!? Hahaha, You’re being deliberately sarcastic there to make me laugh, right? If you are, maybe it won’t translate very well into text so people reading this will think you really do think everyday life is pretty psychedelic. Though, maybe your life is? Is it? Are you saying you don’t have to live like a tweaked out hippy because, a bit like Oberlix in Asterix, you were dropped in the magic potion as a child? A potion made up of 110% proof home-brewed psychedelia!

CA: Maybe it is tinged with sarcasm but I think there is a truth in it. Science and nature produce things that are pretty trippy – rainbows, galaxies, mountains etc. Just watch wonders of the solar system, Brian Cox is tripping out over space all the time! I think it’s seeing the magic in the every day that I’m talking about. It’s easy to get ground down living in a grey shitty town that stinks of tramps, and I regularly do but I think its important to remember that there’s a bigger universe out there. Which reading this back sounds like I am a hippy… basically, I don’t make work about how shit everything can be because it’s depressing. I’d rather concentrate on something colourful and optimistic. I like the idea of the home brewed potion though!

RC: I can’t watch Brian Cox because I am annoyed at the fact every girl fancies him and they go on about how cool he is for a scientist. Plus he was in the band D:Ream which just reminds me of New Labour’s political campaign in the 90s. So, because London is pretty mucky and grey, you transport to a mythical realm of bright colours and 70s chic? Your work is a form of escapism? I buy into that, it makes me happy… your art… though sometimes I feel a little bit gay for liking the proper cute stuff with cats and that. If your work wasn’t being made by you, it would definitely be the work of a flamboyant homosexual with great taste!

CA: Haha, amazing, I shall take that as a compliment. Escapism, yes. I’m happy that makes you happy and it makes me feel like I’ve achieved what I set out to do. Everyone likes a kitten and a rainbow and surely it takes a real man to admit that. Brian Cox kind of gets on my nerves too and I definitely don’t back the D:Ream section of his career. He is very excitable, though. If he were to change his name in the style of prince I’m sure he would change Brian to an exclamation mark.

RC: Exclamation mark cox? !Cox, He does love a bit of punctuation… D-colon-Ream. Though his name now looks like some internet language rude word: omg LOL u !cox. Do you think East London would look a bit nicer with a few rainbows and that? Maybe a few kittens and a mountainous skyline? You should propose that to your local counselor, giving London a Chrissie Abbott make over!

CA: OMG ! COX (all caps)
I don’t know if I could bring myself to do that, I have attempted to paint the exterior of a building before and I have to say it went pretty badly. Street art is not my domain, and anything art based on the street falls under that category in my book. There are probably people somewhere who are quite happy with how it is now with all its gritty realness and they will hate me for my colourful dictatorship. Maybe I should leave and invite anyone who feels the same to come with me. Saying that, Dianne Abbott is the MP for hackney so perhaps I could get a foot in the door by being a namesake.

RC: Everyone would think you were related and think that you only got the job to brighten up London and drag it back in time to a chippy, psychedelic state through family-based nepotism. You’d be branded a sham and your career would be put on ice. What’s in the Chrissie Abbott bag of tricks, then? You have your mountains, your cats, your rainbows… what else?

CA: Hahaha, yes I can see it now. There would be angry mobs tearing down rainbow tower blocks and smashing up statues of unicorns. Mayhem. I guess the things I’m interested in come out in various ways, like magic, the occult, paganism, music, theories of the apocalypse, topography, typography, space, science, lunar phases… anything mystic. And cats of course. Maybe some horses. I’m looking into making tapestries of my collages to make them uber twee.

RC: That’s beyond uber twee, that’s turbo twee, or ‘twurbo’ if you combine the two words. That night you did with Vickie (Hayward of Jaguar Shoes fame), the Prism Party thing, that was kind of like being in your artwork. Can you tell me some stuff about that whole thing?

CA: We wanted to create a sort of dimension where you walk through the spectrum of light, experiencing different colours as you go, but in a fun weird party way. For example the yellow room had blow up bananas, giant daffodils and a guy dressed up as a mustard bottle, the purple room we got our friend Rosy (Nicholas) to dress up as Prince and host purple rain karaoke. The general concept was supposed to be a bit surreal and dream like…

RC: More escapism! I almost feel compelled to embrace you in a Good Will Hunting style moment and just tell you it isn’t your fault… East London is just dirty, it really isn’t your fault! I might comer and clean up your street or something and slowly integrate trippy colour schemes to the cars and houses too! Chrissify your shit without you ever noticing. What are your top 10 children’s TV programs?

CA: That is a lovely thought Rhys, thank you!

Top 10:

1. The Muppet Show
2. Sesame Street
3. Fraggle Rock
4. Willow the Wisp
5. Trap Door
6. Crystal Tips and Alistair
7. Hart Beat (with Tony Heart, not the police one)
8. Button Moon
9. Mr Benn
10. Fingermouse

RC: There is definitely a reoccurring theme there, where we are offered a representation of our world, but really freaky and with loads of make believe thrown in. It’s familiar but otherworldly. Hey, your BF (French) is an illustrator too, do you get real competitive?

CA: I think it would be harder if we were both at university together because there is so much more emphasis placed on other people’s opinions of your work and everything is based on a goddamn marking system. In the real world I’m not really competitive so it’s fine, he works harder and is generally better so I have learnt to accept that and get on with my own thing.

RC: WHAT? You aren’t competitive at all? You are very nice, I gage that, but an artist who is doing as well as you are not being a bit competitive!? I don’t bloody believe it! It’s what drives me… what makes me slog it out day and night and never have any money… the desire to win at art!

CA: YES… I dunno if it’s about niceness, it might be different if I wasn’t making any money and was starving and withering in the corner but I see it as an unnecessary stress to be competitive as there are bigger things to worry about. As long as we are both surviving and not crashing and burning that’s all that counts!

RC: I think my life expectancy would be far greater without the stresses of art. Perhaps your alternative realm, the world in your art, is your release? Your work is your mantra! You can transcend into a happy, colourful, retro-chic world each and every time someone forgets to pay an invoice! “It’s just me, me and the kittens and the mountains and I’ll just hide here, in the sweeping bend of a nouveaux letter ‘y’ that floats in the sky, and I shan’t worry about you owing me money and where my next meal will come from!”

What’s the soundtrack to your world?

CA: That’s totally it! PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) yeah! It’s not necessarily what I always achieve but I definitely attempt to aim towards the positive end of the spectrum. I get super stressy about a lot of things before realising that there’s no point in wasting that energy. When I work I tend not to have a plan, I just kind of zone out and see where an idea takes me. I try not to concentrate on things too much… I try not to take it too seriously. I think a lot of what I do is quite cerebral – working with decent colour combinations and positive themes is how I usually go about things. It often turns out when I am working on a commercial job that if I submit two options, the one I spend more time on is the one that will get rejected. Music plays quite a big role I think when I’m at the ideas stage and a decent soundtrack always aids my working process. At the moment I’m into Sebadoh, Danava, Dinosaur Jr, Fairport Convention, Neil Young, Women, Grizzly Bear, Steve Miller Band. Right this second I’m listening to Tom Vek

RC: Going back to what you said earlier about childrens’ TV… that is quite poignant. You look at things like Wacaday and Fun House… crazy things happened. Or Live and Kicking and Trevor and Simon… that was our ‘reality’!

CA: Yeah, exactly!! Even the Crystal Maze was completely mental. Would Richard O’Brien get a job in this day and age? What about Mumsie? I like the way that growing up things were way more makeshift, you could see the seams and cracks in things because they were either low budget or not so technologically advanced. But the concepts and ideas were amazing and there were fewer boundaries. You could never hit a kid on the head with a giant foam mallet these days. Things just seemed more colourful and adventurous then, what do we have these days? Sponge Bob? (he is kind of cosmic I guess).

RC: The artists of the future will be so square not having had the surreal world of TV we had. Hey, we were talking earlier about all these artists claiming that smoking weed makes them better at being creative. I want to call bullshit on these people. I see it as the easy option… I need to force myself to feel content through overriding anxiety with extensive periods of hard work… but maybe I should just go out and buy some weed and valium and do a weird drawing a week? Shall we both just start getting wasted all the time as an experiment and see what our work is like?

CA: I do hate to admit it but sometimes I think my work was better when I was out of my mind most of the time. Perhaps that is rose tinted nostalgia though. Maybe we should, as an experiment, to verify that? I once took Ritalin to see if it would make me do more or better work but I just got really anxious and grumpy. Also I did an Ayahuasca ceremony a couple of years ago with one of my best friends and a shaman in a random part of Wales, with the aim of shaking more creativity into my brain.

RC: uh… you little dark horse. I want to hear more about the Shamans and stuff.

CA: OK, here are the bare bones of it I guess… my parents died a few years back. I went on some crazy self-destructive benders that helped I suppose, and then I subsequently went on a sort of quest for answers and tried to see things from a different perspective, a higher realm, another dimension, I guess… whatever you want to call it. Spirituality I suppose would come into it but not in a bible bashing kind of way. I went to hypnotists, psychics, tarot card readers, shamans, spiritual healers. I’ve met a lot of interesting people along the way and had some interesting mind expanding conversations, had some crazy dreams. I think dreams are like their own kind of trip, your brain can produce crazy things in a state of unconsciousness. My good friend Laura, (who I did Ayahuasaca with) also put on psychedelic music events called The Dream Machine – a name inspired by the stroboscopic flicker device that was made by Ian Sommerville. And I did all the posters and visuals for her and got to see some really amazing bands and I think that really changed the direction of the artwork that I did, and was a massive inspiration. Is this all a bit too much? I try and not talk about death and stuff in interviews and would almost prefer to leave that stuff out but that is probably the missing section of information you may be looking for? Could be better to leave that out though…i’ll probably regret letting all this out the bag…

RC: Holy shit… I feel so incredibly foolish now. You let me joke around about childrens’ TV and stuff then BAM. I am incredibly humbled you shared this with us, though. It might be more sensitive to omit it, but this is one of the most insightful and honest things I have ever read in an interview with an artist. And it kind of explains so much. I’m glad you aren’t one of these twatty rich kids who can afford to just be off their tits all the time because they bored not having to work ever. They are ten-a-penny in London. Anyway, thank you very much… now let’s go get drunk and do some dancing… I can teach you that wonky Donkey leg dance and the sticky man falling down the wall dance!

For more of Chrissie’s work you can visit her website HERE.  And, to mark the special occasion of our last week of psychedelia, we have a special Chrissie Abbott mix for download below!

Chrissie’s Studio Mix

And here’s a tracklist:

Gypsy – Uriah Heap
Hurry On Sundown – Hawkwind
On Fire – Sebadoh
Shady Lane – Pavement
Bones Of Man – Chad Van Gaalen
Fly Like An Eagle – Steve Miller
Heat Distraction – Women
Summer’s Child – Steel Mill
I Wanna Kill – Crocodiles
Realignment/Higher Power – Spirit Caravan
Heavy Damage – Jeff The Brotherhood
The Prodigal Son – Black Angels
When You Sleep – My Bloody Valentine
Sheila – Atlas Sound
One – Three Dog Night
At Heart – ERAAS
Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles – Captain Beefheart
Superstar – The Carpenters

By Rhys Coren