We recently connected with Darel Carey and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Darel, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I’ve always liked to draw, and had a knack for it since I was very young. As a child I used to draw all sorts of things: cartoon characters, robots, birds, and still life. Then in my adolescent years and in my 20s, I got into graffiti and graphic design. However, art as a career was never something I knew was possible. It was always considered just a hobby, and something I should do just on the side, if at all. Not something to nurture and cultivate into a profession.

Shortly after high school in the Inland Empire, I ran into a friend of mine, Kathy, who just started tattooing. It sounded pretty interesting to me, and I shadowed her a few times. She even convinced me to get a tattoo kit myself, and I got into it for a few months. This was short-lived, though, because I moved down to San Diego and later enlisted in the Air Force, and lost contact with Kathy.

Six years into my Air Force career, in 2007, I happened to be watching TV, and I say this because I hadn’t watched any TV for many years. So I happened to turn one on, and saw a commercial for a tattoo reality show. The star of the show Miami Ink was starting a new show called LA Ink. And to my surprise I recognized the star, it was Kathy! Now known as Kat Von D. I was pretty shocked to see someone I knew on TV so it took a minute to register. But this stuck in my head for the rest of the day and for many weeks afterward. It was so cool to see Kathy succeed in her profession, especially having witnessed the beginning of her tattoo career.

This was the inception point of me eventually realizing that I wanted to pursue a career in art. I was thinking, at one point in time, she and I were in the exact same place: just beginning a creative endeavor. While I went on to work “normal” jobs and begin a career in the Air Force, Kathy continued to pursue her dream. And it worked out for her, she succeeded. As I mentioned previously, I never thought, and was never told, that my interest in art could be a worthy, professional pursuit. I always thought it could only just be a hobby for someone like me. But after seeing Kathy succeed knowing where she started, a tiny ray of light opened in my mind and changed my understanding. It was possible. It was possible for me to pursue what I loved to do, and succeed.

The more I thought about art, my dreams, and my life path, the more that tiny ray of light opened up and shed light on the idea that I wanted to pursue an art career. It became so strong in me that I eventually felt like I needed to try to pursue an art career or I would regret not trying. It took several years for all this to play out, first of all because I was still going through things in my mind, and trying to pursue art part-time. And secondly, I still had five years to finish my second term in the military. When my term was up in 2012, instead of continuing a full career in the Air Force, which I was already halfway through, I separated and went straight to art school in LA.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I attended Otis College of Art and Design from 2012-2016 studying Fine Arts. I was already in my 30’s because I had only recently discovered and decided that I wanted to pursue art seriously. In order to do so I left a career in the Air Force as a language analyst, which I enjoyed. It was just that the call to art grew and became much stronger, and I felt compelled to take that path. I chose Fine Arts because I wanted to explore. I’d always liked to draw and had a wide variety of creative interests, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. So I experimented in paint, sculpture, digital art, and installation. I gravitated towards line-drawing, doodling, and optical art (Op Art). I also had an interest in perspective and illusion.

With the drawing, I would get a sharpie and draw on the wall, or on a modestly-sized piece of clayboard. I drew repetitive wavy lines and organic patterns. I even took the sharpie and doodled on my car! It was fun, it was meditative, and I liked the results. But the problem with this for me was that it was not something unique. It wasn’t necessarily bringing something new to the table. I could find many other artists out in the world doing something similar. So to me it didn’t stand out enough. In order to succeed at all as an independent visual artist, I thought I would need to differentiate my art by doing something more unique.

Since I was a kid I’ve always been a fan of MC Escher. I loved his tessellations and even more so his illusion pieces like Relativity, Waterfall, and Ascending & Descending. I knew I liked illusion, but I didn’t know how I wanted to implement it in my art. For a group show at Otis during my senior year, I used artist tape in the corner of the gallery to create an anamorphic installation. When viewed from a specific vantage point, you would see what looked like a stack of cubes floating near the corner. But once you deviated and walked up to the installation you would see distorted geometric shapes made by tape on the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.

For my senior show at Otis in Spring of 2016 I finally found a way to combine these two interests: drawing repeating lines and creating large-scale illusions. I used tape to draw lines in the corner of a room, and from a certain vantage point it looked like a topographical space coming out of the wall. This was the first such installation, which has since evolved into the art I’ve been creating for the last several years.

Art is something different for everyone. There’s what the artist is trying to convey, and there’s what the viewer or experiencer interprets, and those aren’t always the same. There are no right answers, there’s no one way to approach art. Some art speaks to culture, society, and activism. Some art appeals to emotion, and people are drawn to it because of how it makes them feel. My art appeals to wonder. At least that’s what I try to convey. I want to induce thought. Seeing lines on a wall banding together to create seemingly three-dimensional forms on flat surfaces makes one wonder how that is. It’s an illusion. It’s complex, but from a simple, organic process. It taps into how we perceive the world, and how things aren’t always what they seem. Of course another aspect, perhaps a byproduct, is it’s fascinating and fun to be immersed in such a space. One thing I wasn’t expecting with these installations was people love to move around in them and take a lot of pictures. An example of my initial intention vs people’s interpretation. Not always the same.

My audience and clientele vary pretty widely. I’ve shown in galleries and museums, I’ve worked commissions for corporations, and I’ve done private pieces for individuals. Depending on the context of the project, I either create tape installations, or paint murals. I also do digital work, sometimes for large-scale print or animations. Most of my work is larger scale, room-size, or even large outdoor walls.

I definitely feel fortunate for the opportunities I’ve come across and been able to seize. I’ve been able to travel across the US, and to many places overseas like London, Paris, Munich, Singapore, and Toronto for projects. Something I’m really proud of, is being featured earlier this year in Hi-Fructose Magazine, a contemporary art magazine that I remember always reading 20 years ago as an aspiring artist, with far-off dreams of being featured. Being able to create my art for a living is rewarding. I get to convey my expression to the world, which fulfills my purpose in life: to contribute positively to the world by doing what I do best.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is twofold: doing what I love, and inspiring others. Before I knew I wanted to create art for a living, I always wondered and worried about what my purpose was. It took a lot of self awareness, reflection, and questioning. It came down to answering two questions and seeing where they overlapped, like a Venn diagram. What am I good at, and what do I love to do? I’d recommend anyone wondering what their purpose is to ask themselves these questions. It helped me crystalize my path, and realize that I was living my purpose. And what is that purpose? To contribute to the world, that which I do best. I create art that makes people think and brings them joy and wonder. That’s my role, and that’s what I do best, so that’s my contribution to the world, and that’s my purpose.

Which connects to the other aspect I find rewarding: inspiring others. People have written me or spoken with me about how my art and philosophy has inspired them to create. There have also been many instances where teachers or professors would use my artwork as subject matter for class projects. This ranged from 3rd graders to college students. I’ve seen results of these projects, where students use tape to create their own art, and I’ve even received letters from these students and spoken with classes via video calls. Just knowing that what I am doing is positively influencing young minds and inspiring them to create is the ultimate reward.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I like NFTs. I actually started selling NFTs in 2020, before the hype in 2021. It’s a new technology that has so much potential. Being able to authenticate a work of art digitally has so many implications and is sorely needed in the art world to catch up with our other technological advances. Digital art has floated in a cloudy gray area for the past few decades with so many problems. A digital image is a file that can be copy-pasted many times over. How is there value in that compared to a physical painting? An artist can give you a disk with the “original” file, or only use the file once and destroy it, but this leaves the door open for things to go wrong including authentication of a true original.

A non-fungible token can truly authenticate a piece of art. Sure, people can copy-paste an image of the work, but they don’t own it. Sort of like making a reproduction of a painting but not owning the original painting. This digital authentication is a paradigm shift, so it will take some time to get used to.

Having said all that, I was not a fan of all the NFT hype, and “collector” series like baseball cards that hit the scene in droves. There’s a difference between art and baseball cards. When I started selling NFTs, it was artists creating one-of-ones, or limited editions, and other creative series. But during the craze in 2021, all kinds of people were trying to hop on a gravy train and come out with any and everything that was a digital collectors item. And people bought into the hype as they saw the value of some NFTs skyrocket. It was cheap, and it gained popularity too fast without reason, and there were many scams, like a Tulip Mania. And then it all came crashing down.

I think this did damage to the perception of what an NFT is, because there are still many actual digital artists that take their art seriously that legitimately sell their art this way, and yet they are painted with the broad brush of “scam NFT artists”. Of course there are still a lot of people who are fans of NFTs and still believe in the potential, but a large swath of people were turned off by the bubble. Either way, I do think NFTs are not going away. The technology is just too useful, and it will be implemented more wisely and be accepted by more and more people as time goes by.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.darelcarey.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darelcarey/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/darelcarey
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/darelcarey

Image Credits
All taken by me.