We were lucky to catch up with Bill Rude recently and have shared our conversation below.
Bill, appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
When I was about four years old, I had wandered out of the house on my own and got picked up by the Police. While they were tracking down my parents I spent the time entertaining everyone at the station by drawing pictures.
What that means is that I don’t think there was ever really a beginning, or more accurately, a time before the beginning that I was going down a creative path.
Through elementary school I was drawing on my own and continually coming up with and writing stories. In 4th grade I even got credit for an independent project writing and illustrating my own comic book that was made available for the students to check out of the library. It was called “Forest Force”. The certificate of recognition is still around somewhere. I’ll probably never top that success.
Parallel to this interest in visual arts, I was also fascinated with monsters and halloween for as long as I can remember. The decorations, dressing up, and the general tone of the house and even the whole world becoming a little bit creepy every year. Everything in and around this was the kind of stuff that was motivating my work.
By the time I was in High School and drawing vampires for the smart goth chick so that she’d let me copy her homework, the general consensus of everyone around me was that I was going to be a professional artist in some capacity. I can’t tell you how many people from that time tell me that they still have original drawings and doodles I had made, as if they were one day going to be worth keeping.
My goal was to really focus on visual storytelling, specifically filmmaking, but the path I thought I’d take was to major in Physics in college, and then express myself by learning film on the side. This was how effortlessly ubiquitous the idea of creativity was in my life, that I naively thought I would be able to split my time with what would have been an all-consuming academic major.
Luckily I had a really great High School art teacher, and two extremely supportive parents that all recognized where my true talents lied. My Dad had asked me to apply to at least one art school, which I did. Then because of the help of my Art Teacher, I ended up getting a portfolio scholarship to the one art school I applied to: the Minneapolis College of Art + Design. They didn’t have physics, but I chose them because they were one of the few art schools at the time that had a film department.
The trajectory of my expressive endeavors essentially went like this:
1) Draw, draw, draw to get into Art School.
2) In Art School, never draw again and make lots of films and photographs.
3) Graduate, become a professional in the film industry, and at the age of 35 start drawing again, teach myself to paint, then tie all of these loose ends together again with writing.
So here I am now with a 20+ year career in the film industry but am far, far more well known for drawing and writing about monsters than anything I’ve ever created for a movie or TV show.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
The genre that I use to describe my artwork is ‘Retro Horror’, and is identified under the label of ‘7 Hells’. It’s entirely based off a love of the roots of horror and depicting it with a nostalgic perspective. 7 Hells also defines horror in a specific way, which is: “Anything unusual, that exists with confidence”. This means the monsters you may be coming across could resemble more of disenfranchised sub-cultures just as often as one having claws or fangs.
My main body of work is what I refer to as ‘False History’. It is a large series of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and merchandise, that depicts a completely fabricated history of how media (may have) depicted different genres of horror. All of the work ties in together and paints a broad world that is built on Movies that never were, pulp novels never written, and magazine never snuck under the covers to read with a flashlight. This would be the work you’d most likely run into in an art gallery.
The other series of work that I have deal with real history. They are portrayed as tribute art and historical art. The tribute art is to depict a specific movie, book, TV show, or other cultural touchstone, in an intentionally nostalgic aesthetic to give its significance a particular perspective. The historical art is more research based, and uses authentic looking styles of drawing and painting to express horror folklore from various places around the world.
The third tentpole of my work is writing about and speaking on all of this work that I am inspired to create. Wether it be a historical analysis of a specific genre of horror, or it be flushing out an artificial documentation of how a world of media that never existed, could convincingly exist. These are presentations and lectures at schools and events, books, comics, and any other sometimes unexpected places anecdotes can be planted.
As all of these bodies of work get bigger and bigger, my goal is to find people and brands to collaborate with, to essentially help spread the tales behind the artwork. This can be in the form of publishers/distributors, related merchandise, or a curated space juxtaposing the bodies of work.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The core of everything I make is to communicate, and in a more practical way, educate.
Painting movie posters that never existed is to be able to use modern knowledge and hindsight to accentuate the intricacies of how movies had to be made 70 years ago, and why they were promoted the way they were. It is to pass along not just the knowledge of the cultural landscape of those times, but to inspire others to further discover and appreciate it on their own.
Drawing the image of a long-lost fairytale is about forcing the viewer to recognize that it was intentionally done in a certain style, and to ask and investigate “why?”.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
It can help to put creativity, and being creative, into perspective: Creativity is an unstoppable force, it exists in everybody, but everybody has different amounts of it. Most everyone can relate to that nagging feeling in the back of their minds to move a piece of furniture to a different wall, paint a room a certain color, or to change the license plate frame on their car. That is expressing creativity, and nothing is going to stop it on an emotional level.
Now imagine the creative force of wanting to landscape a park, or investigate the solution to a mystery. How much force does it take to paint a mural, or write a novel? Now imagine trying to stop that force. We know that we can’t stop the desire to express the tiniest things so it is to understand the winds in the sails of a creative can and will carry them for miles and for years. That person cannot emotionally survive in an environment that is not conducive to creativity. In fact, a lot of the times, the environment for creativity has to be created, by creativity itself.
It is all-encompassing in the life of a creative person. It is continually thinking about how things can be made better. It is wondering how one color would look next to another on the side of a building. It is about testing questions of all stripes, all around you, and the journey to try to find an answer. It is science, it is engineering, it is art, it is unstoppable, and enough of it is going to re-direct someone’s entire life to express itself in one fashion or another.
That is also why society puts so much value on the ability to control and focus it. Because we now understand how difficult it is to do just that.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.7hells.com
- Instagram: @7hellsLA
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/7hells
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-rude-0164441/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/7hells
- Other: IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0993953/