As featured in this month’s issue of Dazed, Sumi Ink Club is all about the joy of drawing. Founded by the experimental and inspirational experimental band Lucky Dragons (who seem to channel the absolute optimism of music) the drawing club is the band's visual equivalent. Founders Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Ra Ra are about to release their new book Glamour Banner in collaboration with Nieves and create the new Dirty Projectors video, so we caught up them to talk about Dorothy Day and the joy of painting.
 
Dazed Digital: How did it all begin?
Sarah Ra Ra: Sumi Ink Club began in 2005, with small informal gatherings in a shabby three-story house in Providence, which we also made into a gallery called “Stairwell Gallery”. From the beginning, drawing was used as a pretext for gathering strangers together in a conversation. The rules governing the activity were formed slowly, and came out of many years of experimentation. We worked hard to find a set of parameters that create a social interaction, a sense of openness and a sense of expansiveness, allowing as many people as possible to join in or to create their own collaborative drawing groups.
 
DD: What do you find the most rewarding aspect of collaboration?
Sarah Ra Ra: A great deal of inspiration comes from people like Dorothy Day and social protest movements, but we wanted to create a space that people could stumble into accidentally, and that could include people of different generations and different walks of life. For the Los Angeles chapter of Sumi Ink Club, we send out a weekly invitation that states – “All ages, all humans, all styles.”

DD: Can you remember the first Sumi Ink Club? What was the piece like?
Sarah Ra Ra: It was very awkward, but bold. Much as it is today. There are several of the early drawings floating around in the world. There is an early drawing by Sumi Ink Club that comes as a poster inside the Lucky Dragons album Sewing Circle. The lines are thicker and clumsier, out of balance sometimes... but the style and the spirit is much the same – the melding of multiple hands, styles... and a certain flatness to the composition.

DD: Who are what are your art inspirations?
Luke Fischbeck: Allen Kaprow, Dan Graham, Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, CoBrA, Pauline Oliveros, Yayoi Kusama, Mark Leckey, Jean Dubuffet, William Morris...

DD: Last words on the joy of painting?
Luke Fischbeck: There is something pleasantly focusing about brushing one thing with another and watching the colour change. With many people doing this together at the same time there is a certain happiness, an awareness of progressing together towards a more complete state. What you wind up with is an almost living material that can be transferred and reproduced, while carrying that happily aware moment in which it was made – the conversation, the converging lines – and adding its spirit to whatever it touches.