We recently connected with Jarrett Arnold and have shared our conversation below.
Jarrett, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
To me, making art, is taking a risk, every time I approach my work, it is a new experiment. I begin each day making art which is a ritual I have continued now for about thirty years. The most important risk an artist takes however is the risk to make bad art.
When I make art, I try to take as many risks as I possibly can. It wasn’t always like this though. When I first started taking myself seriously as an artist, I felt that my work should be understood as I intended it, I used symbolism and I was often trying to express my own emotional state to the viewer. I focused on the skills needed to draw and paint realistically from observation and I venerated work that was realistic.
I started to integrate processes in my drawing, painting, and sculpting routine that I did not have control over in 1994 while I was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia studying drawing and painting and dance. These processes included: painting on other people’s artwork that I recovered from dumpsters and leaving portions of their work in the final pieces, Dancing with a paint brush and my eyes closed to make marks on the surface, throwing paintings in the street to let foot and vehicle traffic move over the work and make marks, throwing paint at the surface, dripping paint on the surface, covering surfaces in adhesive and rubbing them in the dirt, and even lighting the work on fire, and dousing it with water at different stages in the burning process. Despite experiencing occasional success in creating art while using processes outside of my control, I still usually tried to create images that were beautiful, illustrative, and or narrative. I would follow random mark making by looking at the work and pulling realistic imagery out from the chaos and refining that imagery. That being said, this interest in loss of control while creating art, and integrating physical objects and happenstance into the work eventually led to a continually deepening interest in expressing myself through collage and abstraction.
In the summer of 2018 while on break from my job as a high school science teacher, I experienced a severe artist block. I felt that I wasn’t making good drawings and paintings and I was understandably upset. During most summers since gaining employment as a full time teacher, I made art full time (at least 40 hours a week) . Distraught, after a month of not making, I opened a book called ‘Gonzo Art’ by Ralph Steadman, and I started reading. Though I have over a hundred books about artists with art in them, I generally only look at the pictures in these books. In the book, Ralph describes meeting Hunter S. Thompson, and his first illustration jobs in the United States. In one passage he talks about drawing people in a Kentucky bar so badly that they beat him up. All of a sudden, I realized that I needed to make some really bad art, or be willing to risk my work being horrible in order to ever make anything great. If an incredible artist like Ralph Steadman made work so bad that people were driven to violence, I myself needed to take similar risks to ever become the artist I wanted to be.
Since then I have made some of the worst and some of the best art of my life and my work continues to get worse and better. No process is off limits at any stage of my work now, and I am more interested in making work whose message is ambiguous, but honest than I am in communicating a specific thought, feeling, or idea.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I work in my sketchbook every day. The images I create range from non-objective to representational. Sometimes they are about my literal experiences and thoughts; sometimes they illustrate feelings. Whether a portrait portrays me, someone I know, or an abstract concept, my work explores the underlying workings of the human mind. It makes fun of itself. It celebrates or laments life. Sometimes I simply portray a view of a person so intimately that you might want to look away.
I steal from artists that have come before me. I riff with Jackson Pollack’s rhythmic marks, Basquiat’s use of text, Jenny Saville’s figures in motion, or Pablo Picasso’s geometric perspective shifts. I use a variety of methods to generate my images: drawing from life, referencing photographs I take that are compelling, or by pulling an image from within a chaotic series of marks.
I often begin a piece by listening to music and combining collage, drawing, and abstract expressionist painting. I use the detritus of life around me. While I work, I am searching for the marks that will determine the direction the piece will take. Like my own life, each painting is a combination of the path I am trying to walk and the discordant influence of circumstance and luck. Even my most realistic paintings contain the ghosts of their previous incarnations. In this way, each painting I create is a portrait of the moments in time that lead to now—combined with realities I cannot avoid.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding thing about being an artist is having something that interests me so completely that I don’t need an alarm clock to wake up. Each day I open my eyes and think about the pieces I am currently working on and each day, while lying there in the dark, I realize, what I want to do next. It is exciting, and I am never quite sure where each picture is going to end up, what it might be about, or when I will finish it. Then, once I am in my studio, the art is all there is. I love it,
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I am interested in telling the truth, I used to think truth was something a person could understand. As I have gotten older, I have realized that any one person can’t really see the truth. So while I am also interested in learning the truth and being truthful, my art work is about trying to understand the world more than it is about explaining the world. I also hope that by letting my personal world move the artwork, by being truthful, other truth seekers might find some note that resonates with them. If this happens, I believe I might inspire people to find themselves, to be themselves, and then create work that is truthful to themselves and share that work with the world.
Contact Info:
- Website: jarrettarnoldart.com
- Instagram: jarrett.arnold
- Youtube: TheCutieAndTheCreep