Darrell

I drew constantly as a kid, set the pencils down around middle school, and didn't pick them up again until my 40s. What brought me back wasn't a plan. It was just an itch that got loud enough to answer. Since then I haven't put them down. I work in pen, ink, and watercolor. Music has always been in the room when I work. At some point it stopped being background and started being the subject. I began drawing the songs themselves, the imagery inside them, the era they came from, the moment they hit the charts. The record shape came naturally. It was the object the music lived in. A companion series called Radio Shuffle has one rule. Whatever song comes on the radio has to be on the paper before the song ends. No skipping. Fifteen to seventeen songs in an hour, captured in real time. Alongside the music work I draw imagined architectural pieces, buildings that look like they've been added onto, adapted, and lived in. I start with line work and let the watercolor build the character from there. The irregularities are intentional. Things that look like they grew into themselves over time are more interesting to me than things that were perfectly engineered. Both series come from the same place. Whether I'm filling a record with the life of a song or drawing a structure that grew into itself over decades I'm after the same thing. Something that looks like not only life, but history as well.