It’s past midnight at Wicker Park’s Big Wig nightclub, and Dr. Pants Laroo is sitting at the bar, looking glum. She’d been painting on the dance floor for over an hour, but the management felt the bright spotlight shining on her canvas was dampening the party vibe. “They asked me to take a break so they could turn out the light for people to dance,” she says. “I don’t really like it, but I understand it needs to be done.”
Disheartened by years of meager income, negative reviews, and public indifference, many budding artists wind up quitting. But Pants, who’s dealing with all these problems, isn’t giving up yet.
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Born in Queens and raised in Columbus, Pants entered Ohio Wesleyan University in 1995, and it was there that she came up with her nickname. “I made up my name, Pants Laroo,” she says, because she was always wearing baggy pants, “and then introduced myself jokingly to a group of strangers at a college party and it stuck. The Dr. was added on later somehow, I’m not sure when.”
As Pants prepares for her Tuesday-night Big Wig appearance, James is spinning a jazzy set of instrumental house, but there’s only one couple dancing. A little after 11, Pants walks up to the canvas standing near the DJ booth, grabs a brush, and starts to mix acrylic paint. She paints a light purple background, and some people put their conversations on pause to watch her. She starts to groove to the music, her back and shoulders bobbing up and down. She spends the next half hour or so layering more colors on the background; when James passes the baton to DJ Striz, who changes the groove to tech house, Pants works twice as fast. Within a few minutes she’s painted a blue creature that looks like a cross between an amoeba and Casper the Friendly Ghost.
That people recognize themselves in her work at all is surprising, because she never renders human figures realistically. “I used to do that in college, because I was worried that if I did something abstract, people would think I just didn’t know how to paint,” she says. Eventually she lost that fear and began to paint shapeless characters that later evolved into monsters. Over the past six months or so she’s been painting robots and dogs. “It’s a simplified way to represent how people are,” she says, adding that over time these characters have evolved into something of a personal symbology: dogs usually represent innocence, robots are maniacal and sometimes evil, and the monsters are “very emotional.” There is a childlike quality to her work, and she owns up to it proudly. “As a child, everybody is an artist,” she says. “But in art school you have that trained out of you. You’re not supposed to have that rawness. So if somebody says, ‘That looks like my kid did it,’ that’s a compliment, because it’s not easy to convey that feeling.
Pants wants to be able to make a living off her art but stumbles when asked how she intends to get there. “Not every artist is necessarily good…I’m not good at marketing myself.” She would love to do an exhibition but doesn’t quite know how to go about it. “I’m not sure my paintings would work in a gallery setting. Just putting it on a wall and having people look at it, I don’t think that would be right. Maybe if I could do sort of an installation, with music.” Above all, she clings to an adage her mentor taught her. “Jane Dickson had this saying: ‘The only successful artists in the world are the ones who can’t figure out something else to do,’” she says. “And I can’t figure out anything else to do with myself.”
