Abby Portner

Abigail Portner is an American visual artist, designer, music video director and musician in the bands Rings and Hex Message, and solo under the name Drawlings. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Abby Portner's work is closely connected to her friends and especially to her brother David Portner's band Animal Collective. She started to make tour posters when they were still in High School together in Baltimore, Maryland. She later moved to New York City to attend Parsons School for Design, but continued to make record covers and still designs shirts, tour posters and merchandise for the band. For Animal Collective's album Merriweather Post Pavilion, she contributed a music video for the song In the Flowers. In the summer of 2010 she built a live set for two Animal Collective shows in Prospect Park in New York City that contained large scale paintings and sculptures of jellyfish, tiki men, moving sharks and shooting water. The work was handmade by Portner in small parts with the help of friends in a working space in Bushwick, New York City, and put together on stage. Besides drawing for Animal Collective, Portner worked on a wide range of visual art projects, including tattoo designing and cartoons. In the end of 2008 she designed skateboards for the Ohio-based brand Alien Workshop. In mid-2010 Portner worked as a guest artist for the animated series The Velvet Mouse Show. In early 2010, The Fader magazine featured Portner in the 65th issue with some artwork and a portrait. In addition, an interview and a slideshow with the artist's work was posted on the magazine's website. According to herself, the inspiration for her imagery comes from sources like old photos of her childhood, children's magazines and Disney World. She points out the motif of play and playfulness as the main theme of her work. Accordingly, recurrent themes in her drawings are animals, masked children, Christmas and Halloween. In addition to this "childlike" approach Portner adds a dark, melancholic and often eerie undertone to her figures: It's like how I can't draw a child without it looking scary.