Tag: dark art

Art: Grandiose Ego and Self Hatred

deloria424

There was a full building of Native artists. All throughout the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation. The Gift of Mother Earth Art Show. Father’s Day 2022. I would have been in my fifth year of painting “professionally.” I moved off rez to be near art markets, and I managed to join a few. There was a “nerd con”, a few renaissance fairs, a beer market, a day long music fest in downtown Rapid. Opportunities were scarce. Having walked this path now for quite some time – I envy the lives that my art friends are living back home.

They have formal educations, mortgages, families, and fulltime jobs. They make art, they make good-to-great art. And their in-person art events are manageable. A few cons here and there, a few trips here and there, travel to Denver for a weekend or two, travel to Sioux Falls for a weekend or two, travel to Wyoming or what have you. Meet new people, network, and make some cash.

I made cash too. I made good cash most of the time. But it was all a solo endeavor. My gear was made piecemeal. Display racks and shelves were bought when there was extra money. Prints and stickers were made when I was clear of rent for the month. My art setup was just like my life setup. Everything should fit in at most three totes and that’s it.

In 2026, looking back, and looking forward – things never really improved. If I had to frame it in a way that made sense to myself, who isn’t a typical artist, I’d say I’m in my busking/songwriter phase. I haven’t reached that regional opener level. I’ve been at it for damn near a decade and things just haven’t fell into place. I’m still showing up to sketchy venues with three totes, making a display setup with what little equipment I can hobble together.

The shows I’m able to get in, the “galleries” I’m able to join – they aren’t real galleries. They’re warehouses in out-of-the-way factory districts.

I was never able to break through.

It is what it is, I guess.

Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation. Father’s Day. 2022. I’m set up at two tables. I have big paintings leaning up against the blankets that are hanging over my tables. I have milk crates with smaller paintings, the bulk of which sit on the tables in columns and rows. I have two light stands without lights. They are fully extended with two bigger paintings hanging off of the nub ends, swaying side to side with the currents of tourist breath.

I have these massive paintings with me, massive for my setup at least. They’re two feet wide, and three feet tall. They’re bright pink with rotting humanoids holding lyres made of skulls. Landscapes made of vivid blues and neon greens, with the silhouette of a lady breaking up from hundreds of leaves.

The tourists come and go, looking through the artisan stands. You can guess what you’d see at a Native art show with ease. Native art is by nature dogmatic. Programs that foster the arts in Native communities focus on the past. We’re stunted willingly. I think it’s because it’s easier to justify federal grants if the work is overtly Native. I have a lot of problems with the Native art world’s preoccupation with dogma.

My paintings are arrows. You can see it in the faces of onlookers. Like a jolt of lightning flying from the art itself. The few that resonate with it are struck. They come up and say, “I don’t really understand…” they motion to the rest of the venue, “but this, I get this.”

A security guard wanders around making small talk with the beaders and jewelers. Wanders a while longer before stopping a bit back from my booth. He stands around for a long, long time. After a bit he finally steps up and takes a closer look at everything. Starts talking about his life and his love of heavy music. Talks about traveling for concerts and this and that.

I wish I remembered his name. Nice guy. By the end of the weekend, he’d leave with a few of my nicer pieces.

A young man comes up and sorts through my portraits of melted, horned people. He finds one and says, “do you have one with just one horn?”

I look around, “yeah I think I might have something for you.”

I pull out a green and black piece of a sorrowful ghost with a single horn.

He sits there, all quiet for a long time.

“See. I wanted one horn because of this.”

He pulls his bangs back to reveal a massive scar.

It’s been a long time since someone seen my art in real life.

Sure, stuff goes out regularly, but those are always one-on-one. I see them in my little hovel, and they see them when they get the mail. I never get to see or hear about what this stuff means to anyone. And in a lot of ways, I don’t understand it anymore.

The last time I was awestruck by art was out in Hill City, Sd.

There was a contemporary art gallery, a very small one, called Warrior Works. They had full sized prints and originals from an Ojibwe artist named Joe Geshick. They were serene. They reminded me of religious paintings or something Carl Jung would make. Geshick had been dead for quite some time by the time I got to see his work.

I don’t know if it “floored me” but I was sure lost for a moment.

I take art for granted and it’s something that happened quietly. It’s like erosion of the spirit. It started at some point and just kept going and going and going. This obsession with not-being-broke took appreciation from me. I can’t take time out to chat. I have to make something new. I have to stress and cuss at myself and cuss at God again. My life, as an artist, exists in a thousand small moments spread throughout the week.

I don’t appreciate the way things are, I don’t appreciate the good things that came, or the severity of what it is I do.

I was living in a Best Western back in late 2022/early 2023. That was a hellish stretch, man. I finished my art residency at the foundation, which was good! The people were great, talking to tourists while working on new art, with a good budget, all of it was great. The house they put you in was great, all of it was great. But it was only for a month. And that month came and went fast.

October was here before I knew it and I hadn’t lined anything up yet.

I found myself at a campsite in Piedmont, SD. A now closed campsite. There are two, I stayed at both. One was nice and I would go back any time, the other, not so great.

It was hell.

Freezing.

That’s a story for another time.

I left that cabin in the winter because it was too cold. I left like the family in the original Amityville Horror. The place may as well have been haunted. I could see the floor through the cracks in the walls. I could see the stars and clouds through the cracks in the ceiling. We had a series of winter storms, and each brought colder and colder weather.

I’m at a Best Western and it costs 350 a week. I have to paint fast. I have to paint every day.

I can’t think about the people who receive the art. I can’t think about how history will think of me, if it ever does.

I get a message from a lady. She bought some art. Paintings on bison shoulders. She asks me if I knew any medicine men or if I was one. She said that since she got her paintings she’s been hearing and seeing things. Said she got a divorce and set out on her own life journey. It was then that I started to see what this art thing could be, and it worried me.

I’ve had vivid dreams. I’ve had dreams that gave me riddles to solve while dreaming. I’ve had death premonitions. I wallow in miserable feelings as some unhealthy act of self-flagellation. I’ve read plenty of books on Jungian psychology and comparative mythology. I’m familiar with esoteric ideas, with the occult, with alchemy. I could very well put on a mask and pretend to be something that I’m not.

But at the end of the day, I’m just a guy who paints.

I’ve had people send me pictures of their cut wrists, who were a long way into recovery. People who felt connected to what I make simply because I paint.

I’m always behind on my back orders because money is always tight, because life costs money to live.

I’m enduring a thousand small catastrophes throughout the week, and they distract me from the very heavy sword hanging over my neck. I can’t think of what art means to the people who like what I do. I can’t think about anything farther than “if I make one more sale, I’ll be closer to making things right.”

I think, vividly about leaving. That should be obvious from my art. I tried to hang myself and a closed box near me started banging from the inside. I stopped what I was doing. I think I should’ve been scared or worried, knowing that there was something out there, and it wasn’t esoteric or “just thoughts.” There was something sharing space with me, only a few yards away.

I stopped and said to it, “Okay. Well, if I’m not supposed to, then what am I supposed to do? Things don’t work out. Things aren’t working out. Nothing ever seems to work.”

It didn’t speak back. All it could do was bang on this box…

A nice lady reached out to me to check on her order and shared a bit about her son. Art means a lot to people who aren’t me, it means a lot more to them than I realize, and after he got his package, he sent me a nice email. Says he sees me as a survivor. Says he read some of my stories on some website. Says this art helps him.

Thoughts of leaving become selfish when I realize people like what I do.

I have problems with ego, man. You would too if you were there. It’s like you’re being torn in two directions. There’s a part of you that believes that we’re destined for great things, that the work we make matters, and then it hears stories from people, and it gets pushed farther and farther into these delusions – and then reality comes roaring back, all to slam me on my ass.

Sales dry up. My health goes down the shitter, and I realize that I’ve been at this for damn near a decade with nothing to show for it.

Influences

deloria424

I don’t think my work is in anyway unique. If you understand the ingredients that go into a “Datura” then you should be able to make one for yourself. Now, there are somethings that keep my work moving forward, and those “somethings” are self-determined. I’m talking about ego and editing. I found and find myself annoyed by stagnation in my own work. In the beginning, I was annoyed by making portraits without dynamic poses, I was annoyed by the recurring theme of “small guy faces off against giant”, I got annoyed by my limited color palettes. I’d get annoyed with paintings or drawings that I finished and would paint over them, draw over them, or edit and mash them into new pieces in photoshop.

If you were to follow the development of my art through the years, you can see me brute-forcing my way through new palettes. It started with black and white, black and red, blue and black, blue and white, pink and black, purple and pink, etc etc… It took a lot of trial and error to find color schemes and specific shades of paint that work best together.

I think my work stands out in color, mostly. And that was always the intention. My work is not anatomically great, my work is not great from a composition standpoint, my work is not great from many angles. What I can do to offset my lack of formal training is use heavily saturated and loud colors.

The skulls and faces are relatively simple, the anatomy of my animals aren’t particularly dynamic or real-world accurate, and the good thing about art, is that that can absolutely work just fine.

The idea I keep coming back to is subgenres in distorted-guitar-music. The truly great artists like Bekskenski create work that would sound like symphonic death metal, and my barebones style – I’d say it’s more to older hardcore. Something simple but hard hitting. And that’s always the gray line with dark art. If our stuff is too polished, then it begins to drift into video game monster or fantasy novel territory. If our stuff is too sloppy then we’re no different than the endless waves of no name Basquiat wannabes.

There are a number of contemporary artists that I draw heavy inspiration from, but I’m not too sure if they’d want to be associated with what I do or who I am. I have a good amount of self-hatred going on and that’s just always been the case, so I won’t mention or showcase any of them, but if you’ve followed me on Instagram, you should know which modern artists I resonate with.

Here’s how the basic stew is made, and you can mix them however you want.

BeksiÅ„ski – I go back to Zdzislaw constantly. I think every dark artist does. He was the first to do it at this level. His compositions are great; his color schemes were great. For the first two years of painting, I was primarily a finger painter. When I started to use brushes and more varied color schemes, I went to BeksiÅ„ski. I like to study how he lays out his compositions; I try to see his take on portraits and perspective.

Do I make studies of his work? No. But I think you can easily see his influence in what I do. And you should be able to see his work that I’ve gone back to time and time again. I’d highlight specifically his rotted horse rider piece. I’d say a lot of my landscape work is a bastardized expansion on what Bekskinski did. His landscapes were great, but there weren’t a ton of them, and they weren’t doing what I liked.

He has a few with a singular subject against a desolate landscape, but there’s not many. So my landscape work became that. Make what you want to see.

Gustave Dore – Dore is the one artist who managed to make a drawing that, to this day, still makes me feel uneasy. His Destruction of Leviathan carries so much weight, so much impact. I seen this thing twenty, thirty years ago, and it almost felt wrong to look at. The serpent falling into the ocean just hits. It has weight. You can feel the enormity of it all.

Dore was prolific. Our styles are very much different, he was an engraver and an illustrator, neither of which, I am or ever will be. His work, his anatomy, his compositions, they’re just wonderful. His darker stuff, probably because they’re in the public domain, turns up time and time again on album covers. If you want to create an ink-Datura, look at a lot of Dore. I can’t say enough about the guy’s work.

Francis Bacon – Who in our genre, ain’t influenced by Francis Bacon? His work speaks for itself. There are artists in our field that have made entire careers based solely off of Bacon, just like the Basquiat worshippers or the Zdzislaw worshippers. Some do it well, some don’t. I don’t know where I fall on that spectrum, we’ll say in the middle.

Almost all of my work, my humanoid work at least, features an open mouth with jagged teeth. I don’t know if that’s because I myself am a open mouthed, underbitten savage who wants some representation in his work, if it’s because showing a screaming mouth works as an amazing shortcut for conveying agony and loss.

I find a good bit of Bacon’s taste in color to be… muddy and not particularly great, but the good stuff is the Good Stuff. His sea green and black pope portraits, his violet and neutral blacks, grays, and browns, his reds and grays.

There was a time where I would add these geometric lines into my work, mostly because of how much Francis Bacon I was looking at, but also because some of those geometric lines just felt right. I think in the more… excited art, the more excited paintings, you can, or at least I can, see where things naturally segment themselves off into. It’s very easy to highlight these sections with a ruler and a gel pen.

Joel-Peter Witkin – Oddly controversial in art discussions. I guess I’m so desensitized to dark art that the mediums that he used don’t really hit as hard as they do for others. Yeah, he used real corpses for his work, but that’s just edgy shit. Edgy shit has been around forever. I get sanctity and respecting life, but what are we really doing here? The work exists, and the work is metal as fuck.

I think, if we’re going to pretend that there’s not some primal monkey-poking-at-a-rotting-snake level of fascination with his work, we can highlight his use of negative space. It’s wonderful. We don’t need to use the entire canvas to create effective art. Sometimes, a single figure surrounded by a few restrictive colors is all you need to make a good composition.

This entry is intended to be short. So, I’ll wrap up soon. But we’re talking influences, and one big influence on my work, that I wasn’t even aware of, was the work of Travis Smith. Back in my day, the day of print media – Wizard Magazine, Hit Parader, Revolver, etc. etc… – back in rural South Dakota, there wasn’t a lot of easily accessible darker media. We would sit in cars that barely worked, listening to radio static, hoping that the hard rock and metal station, based out of a city damn near three hours away, would break through for a few songs.

We bought albums based solely off of artwork, and we had to travel to even do that. The nearest spot to get music was in Pierre, SD. That’s a solid 70 minutes away.

I used to draw shit-I-found-cool in my magazines. It didn’t matter if I listened to the band or not. If it looked cool, I’d draw it. If it looked really cool, I’d draw it and redraw it.

And, what I found out, some fifteen years later, is that a lot of those album covers and shirt designs that I would redraw in my down time, they were all Travis Smith’s work.

I’m not super interested in graphic design, and I’m not the biggest fan of Travis Smith’s work these days – as in, I don’t follow him anywhere or seek out his stuff, but I can’t say that I wasn’t heavily influenced by him in the early years.

And his work is just straight up iconic. If you go through his client list, you’ll see great albums that you love or loved, and you might not know that it was this fella who did all of ’em.