Molly Crabapple is sitting in an appropriately noirish and velvety Soho club, talking animatedly about the “global slide to authoritarianism”. “I’m American: tangerine Hitler is our Republican presidential frontrunner, but Russia has Putin, and Europe has the rise of fascist parties. It’s a very, very dark time.”

She looks like an otherworldly heroine from a Tim Burton film but real-world politics are what fuel her fire, be it in the articles she writes or on the massive canvases she paints, often in conjunction with each other. In the past she has depicted the Guantánamo Bay trials, the lives of Syrian refugees in Iraq, or fat Wall Street bankers for the Occupy Wall Street movement, coming across like capitalism’s very own courtroom sketch artist. Her colourful, inkblot-splashed pieces swarm with detail: half punk, half baroque, always with a potent message.

Born in Queens, New York, Crabapple was encouraged to put pen to paper from a young age. “Make art every day,” she quotes her great-grandfather. “Without art, you’re dead!” She went on to lead an unusually bohemian lifestyle. At 17, she left home to go travelling solo, becoming one of the so-called “Tumbleweeds” who slept among books (and dirt) in the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare & Company, then going on to explore Turkey, Kurdistan and Morocco.

Construction workers straightening rebar in Gaza, in a neighborhood destroyed in Israel’s 2014 invasion of the strip. Illustration: Molly Crabapple

Back in New York, she dropped out of art school after one year and became a professional burlesque dancer and “naked girl”, adopting the pseudonym Molly Crabapple (she prefers not to disclose her real name, Jennifer Caban, in person, though it is there for all to see on Wikipedia). She would pose for amateur photographers she found on Craigslist (or, as she calls them, GWCs, “Guys With Cameras”), a job that put her in situations as surreal as having crickets poured on her breasts for a metal video or, as she wrote in her book, “posing for a Hassidic Jewish guy in the Bronx amid hundreds of hard-boiled eggs … I was broke enough to take some home to eat.”

The lies told to artists mirror the lies told to women Molly Crabapple

As routes into the art world go, it may raise prudish eyebrows. But Crabapple reasons that without the money she made from working as a naked girl, she never would have had the materials, space or time to make the art that first got her noticed. “The lies told to artists mirror the lies told to women: be good enough, be pretty enough, and that guy or gallery will sweep you off your feet, to the picket-fenced land of generous collectors. But make the first move, seize your destiny, and you’re a whore.”

At 22, she was spending her modelling money on mailing her portfolio to hundreds of art directors, until one from the New York Times called. “The thing is, I honestly don’t know what I would have done that would have been better. There’s not a lot of lucrative and easy work for Fashion Institute of Technology drop-outs – or at least I didn’t know about it,” she laughs.

Rebel fighters in East Aleppo. Illustration: Molly Crabapple

Eventually, she became the in-house illustrator for The Box, a vaudevillian-style nightclub that’s a favourite with Wall Street’s finest. By the time the financial crash happened, Crabapple was “already intimately aware of how depraved these men, who were responsible for it, are”. Shortly after the crash, in 2011, Occupy Wall Street erupted right on her doorstep and sharpened her scepticism of those in economic and political power.

Her apartment became a guerrilla press centre and her posters calling for a general strike, portraits of protesters and exuberant drawings of fat cat bankers became synonymous with the movement (one of her posters would end up in MoMa’s permanent collection). As a result, Crabapple’s method of working became radical, too. “Within an hour [of making it] the art would be on the street. It’s the most vital way of using it I’ve seen,” she says.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that she ended up working for gonzo media outlet Vice, in 2013, which sent her to places such as Guantánamo Bay as an illustrator. Despite these hairy assignments, Crabapple remained typically unfazed. US officials “were like ‘[Her art] can’t possibly mean anything’,” she explains later, during a public talk in London, of how she had no problem getting into a press visit to the world’s most infamous prison.

After that, she attended and illustrated the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, replacing the guards’ faces with death masks for effect. Her sketches bring out small but shocking details, such as the cans used for force-feeding prisoners lying empty on the floor. As opposed to a typical reporter with a pen and paper, she most obviously sees events “in a more visual way” but she also says another point of difference is that “because I am relatively new to journalism, I see things in a way that is more in line with how a reader might see them”.

Molly Crabapple, the artist. Photograph: Clayton Cubitt

Hacks might be quick to disagree with that, but it’s hard to argue with the ambition of Crabapple’s works. She’s inspired by “all-consuming, taking everything in, fuck-all-the-girls, paint-all-the-walls, be so fucking big!” artists such as Diego Rivera, as well as appreciating Picasso’s attitude to art.

She admires his “massive, beautiful, masculine entitlement – not because it’s inherent to men, but because only men were allowed it – where he’s like: ‘I’m going to do the greatest war painting of the 20th century, but I’m also going to draw minotaur porn and fucking pottery for five years and people will still think I’m serious,’” she says. “To me that’s what’s exciting, that’s what’s vital.”

I know what I am, and that is I’m greedy and maximalist Molly Crabapple

She has since made portraits of her friends for a solo show in Postmasters Gallery, Manhattan, been published in Vanity Fair and the Guardian, and released Drawing Blood, a memoir that combines autobiography with her vivid illustrations. Even so, she feels like an art-world outsider. “I look at these white-walled galleries in Chelsea and there’s this very elegant, quiet, arrogant person sitting behind a desk, and there are these paintings, and I have no idea how the paintings got from the artist’s studio to that gallery.”

Her work is inherently more populist, as shown by her latest area of exploration: the ongoing refugee crisis. “The way that Europe and America are dealing with refugees and with a challenge to the exceptionalism of the first world, is not by saying ‘Wow, borders are fucked up’ but by entrenching them in the most brutal and fascistic ways,” she says. “And even though it’s all totally visible, many people support that.”

Construction workers give each other haircuts on their day off at a workers’ camp in Abu Dhabi. Illustration: Molly Crabapple

She’s also taking aim at, of course, the upcoming US election. She plans to report on the Republican National Convention, though, unlike many, she does see positives in the current chaos of US politics. “Some of the things that excite me about the election – not the grim signs of the apocalypse, like the idea of Trump winning – are these protests to shut Trump down,” she says. “When those young people in Chicago shut down that rally [in March], it was amazing: you saw Black Lives Matter protesters next to Muslim student protesters, next to anti-fascist protestors; all sorts of people that were creating this powerful movement.”

An hour with Molly Crabapple is a whirlwind of ideas. As we get up to leave, I’m reminded of Susan Sontag, who once said her notion of a writer was “someone who is interested in everything”. Crabapple lights up at the thought. “I have so much respect for anyone who’s a super-specialist – I think, in many ways that’s much more important work – but I know what I am, and that is I’m greedy and maximalist. I, like Susan Sontag perhaps, want to stick my nose in everything.”

Drawing Blood is out now; Molly Crabapple will be appearing at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, held at Sydney Opera House on 3-4 September