A couple weeks ago I caught up with artist Jeremy Novy as he swung through Chicago, and he had his koi kit with him. We cued up in the alley outside of Bucktown Library, underneath a Target: Rats sign, and he got to work.
A white silhouette first. Then orange, sprayed through a stencil that leaves only the patches. Then black for the spots, then a gray-black shadow offset beneath the body so the fish seems to hover a half inch above the concrete. Six stencils in all. He works crouched, in a black nitrile glove, cans lined up on the curb, and the whole thing for two fish took about six minutes.
He talked about the arithmetic of variation. With the same six stencils he can mix the colors, orange with black spots, black with white spots, and so on, and by his count there are 23 distinct versions before he repeats. Then there is the angle. He drops each fish at its own orientation, turned against the next, so that a set of identical templates reads as a school of individuals. If they all faced the same way at the same spacing, he said, it wouldn’t work. Pattern is what makes them recognizable as Novy. Variation is what makes them look alive.
Afterwards, he showed me his studio in the back of a rental car. The stencils travel flat, stacked on cardboard over a rolling suitcase. He says me he can get about 75 sprays out of one before the edges go soft and he has to make another, which he cuts by hand with an X-Acto.
When one wears out, he lays it on a fresh sheet and traces it, which means each generation is a copy of a copy, drifting slightly from the last. Every so often he has to go back to the original, a printout spray-mounted onto board, because after enough generations the spots on the koi stop looking like spots and start looking like random dots.
People tell him to get them laser cut. He won’t. The making of the stencil, he says, is as much the art as the fish.
Before Jeremy started buying proper stencil stock, he used flattened Priority Mail envelopes. They are, it turns out, exactly the right size for a koi. More federal government street art subsidy.
All hail Jeremy Novy.