Lancestronaut

Darrel Perkins

Interview by L. Valena

Let’s start from the top. I want to hear the whole thing. Can you first just start by saying what you responded to?

What I found really interesting about this was how opposite the piece was that I was responding to. The one that I got was a quilt. It looked like a black quilt with these little abstract, very organic pieces of color in there. What’s interesting to me is that I’m the opposite of that. Everything I do is representational. I need to understand what I’m looking at – my illustrations are straightforward. And I work with the figure, so I start thinking about people. I like to draw people, so my instinct was to kind of take some of those abstract forms that were there and find something representational in it. So instead of turning it into something else that is also abstract, my instinct is to make rationalized pieces out of it.

I was looking at it and could have gone in a few different directions – either biological stuff like cells or something about the darkness and the little splashes of color just reminded me of outer space. So I was thinking about outer space and I’m looking at this, and thinking about a child and a quilt, and this wonder around outer space. Maybe it’s just because all of my friends are having kids so I started thinking about kids.

When I was on the plane out here I was looking at it thinking, “let’s see what I can do with how much time I have.” I started out doing a really quick preliminary sketch of a baby staring up into the mobile to stimulate their brain. To them, it’s this whole universe and there’s so much beyond it.

I got really busy on this trip — a lot of what I do is printmaking or painted and I just have not had the time. I know that part of this is to see what happens in two weeks. When I returned to what I wanted to do from the sketches, I was on the train out to visit my friend in Jersey and broke out the ipad. I was going through a hurricane. It was this crazy scene and I was like, “I’m so glad I chose not to drive.” I was on the train drawing on the ipad and ended up piecing it all together. And then when I got to my friend’s place, I walked in and he was playing with his newborn baby with a mobile.

That’s amazing.

Yeah, literally right after I drew it on the train, I walked in and this was him with his kid.

Oh my gooooood oh that’s so beautiful.

I sent them the picture, they’re gonna print it out and put it in his room.

That’s awesome. I love it.

As far as technique: I don’t normally work with a digital drawing, it’s just one step in the process. I really like physical craft, but with this one what I found interesting was it felt like a finished piece. Exploring all the different brush tools definitely opened me up to the possibility of returning to it as a finished process instead of it being one step in a physical process. So it was good, it was really good for me.

That’s awesome. Yeah, I think that is such a beautiful potential of this project since you have to sort of just knuckle down and make something happen, it’s like a way to prove to yourself that maybe something that doesn’t seem like a finished product is a finished a product because you handed it in.

Right, there’s no going back now.

Can you talk a little about how this relates to the rest of your work?

I guess mostly in terms of my approach, I think about telling stories through people and the figure. I instinctively put in this character and it made sense for it to be a baby. That fits into the grander scheme of my work. A lot of my work is in black and white so this one with the colors is probably more of a response to the other piece.

You mentioned that the quilt brought to mind a child or a baby. Is that an association you generally have with quilts? Can you say more about that?

I guess I always liked tapestry arts. In college I would sew things onto friends’ sweatshirts... I do love the comfort of the physical tactile tapestry work and in a different world, I’d be a quilt maker. I do really like that, and I like the comfort that goes along with it. So when I saw that it was a quilt I was responding to, I can’t say I was overtly like “oh it has to be about a baby,” but maybe I thought about it in terms of that a little bit. There was something there with the comfort and the baby, but it wasn’t a direct line. I guess it was an indirect line between the comfort of a quilt, and a baby wrapped in this wilderness of the quilt and the comfort there.

I love that, especially since you’re talking about the cosmos and the baby wrapped in the universe. That’s all of us, right?

Right

I love this space imagery that you have. Is that something that you explore otherwise or have feelings about?

Not so much with my own work, but I teach graphic design at American University in Dubai. Well, I teach a lot of different things, but in the graphic design class, I do something with a surrealist photo collage. So we talk about surrealism a lot and a lot of these photo collages that they do digitally — getting practice with photoshop and everything. A lot of their work includes pieces that have galactic and science fiction backgrounds.

Students really respond to imagery of stars and the cosmos. They usually come out as great pieces, because there’s this sort of expanse with it. If I were to try to turn my preliminary sketch into a painting or a print or something, it would be a ton of work to try to get the splattering of the stars, the streak of a shooting star, or the swirl of the galaxy that I put in there. But what worked really well with the ipad was that I had all these brushes that instead of putting dots for each star, you can put a glow effect on it. It’s a great rapid process thing that’s just kind of exciting. That stuff doesn’t usually appear in my work, but I think part of the reason it’s unlike my other work was that I was trying this new medium.

Cool, sort of exploring the potential in it?

Of digital, yeah.

I think the idea of you making this piece in the middle of the hurricane is pretty cool.

On that train ride, I was so into it. There was the storm, and I was listening to music, and I was really into it and playing and drawing and I was like “this is really fun.” Thank you so much for the opportunity. It was interesting to be able to respond to something that is so outside of my norm of abstract organic pieces.

Do you have any advice for another artist who is gonna do this?

I think this is a good opportunity for us to try new things. I think especially just seeing someone working in a different way, like seeing someone working in a quilt, it’s like “well why I don’t I do something else I wouldn’t normally think of?” So I would just recommend people try something new with it, something out of their norm.

Call Number: Y57VA | Y60VA.peLa

Darrel Perkins is an American printmaker, illustrator, and educator from Providence, Rhode Island. Subjects tend to depict the human form to portray a narrative scene, frequently with nautical, literary, or philosophical tones. He currently teaches Visual Communication at American University in Dubai.