Daryll Peirce Gives Us The Good News…

We are excited to welcome in artist Daryll Peirce for his first RUN with us, the beautifully hand-embellished Or The Bad News First… Daryll Peirce was one of the many talented artists to participate in the Underbelly Project in 2010. Read on to see the transformation for each potential piece, along with process photos and our conversation with Daryll about his 1x Debut, past influences and much more in the latest 1xRUN Thru Interview…

Or The Bad News First… by Daryll Peirce (Before)

Or The Bad News First…by Daryll Peirce (After)

1xRun Thru Interview
Would You Like The Good News Or The Bad News First by Daryll Peirce 

1xRUN: Tell us a bit about the original? When was it created?
Daryll Peirce:  This piece was created in 2012. Both the original drawing and the original painting set are for sale. The Or The Bad News First original drawing is 18″x24″ ink on 140lb Strathmore watercolor paper  and is available here at 1xRUN for $500. The original set of paintings Would You Like The Good News(1/2) + Or The Bad News First (2/2) are 36″x50″x1.5″ acrylic and stain on birch panels, both are available here at 1xRUN for $2000.

1xRun: Tell us how the idea and execution came about?
Daryll Peirce:  I often work in multiple pieces and diptychs to tell a story and emphasize the alternate sides of certain subjects. I had originally created individual pieces, one with a left hand and the other right hand each holding a flowering structure. The right hand holds one colonized flowering micro-environment cluster of living thriving vitality and the other of apathy, negligence, and wilting death. I suppose they’re rooted in our inherent connection to our natural and self-made environments and our role as self-aware and bipolar beings with the power to sustain or destroy ourselves consciously. More literally, we are always faced with choices and in one hand you may hold an improved future and in the other our destruction. I’ve also struggled with personal self-destructive issues as well which is a constant choice we all face to various degrees. I think the highlights are the meticulous linework, the overall impact from afar and subtle skull image within the building shapes as well as the detailed areas to be examined and discovered when viewing up close.

1xRun: How long did the piece take?
Daryll Peirce:  That’s tough to quantify, because it was spread out over several late nights. Some times are spent meditatively rendering in a zone where I tend to lose track of time late into the night. A guess would be somewhere around 15 hours.

1xRun: What is unique about this piece?     
Daryll Peirce:  I want the imagery to inspire a questioning of our surroundings, vices, apathy, individual choice, and explore the possibilities of where we are heading in our age of convenience and short-term thinking. To find the positives within something that is wilting and dying that can yet be saved by the thriving lifeblood still willing to change, fight or withdraw. Interpretation is open to the optimistic or pessamistic depending on the viewer or even mood as there is an intrinsic glass half full or empty message to be revisited daily. Technically, I hope people can get lost in the meticulous linework, the overall impact from afar and subtle skull image within the building shapes as well as the detailed areas to be examined and discovered when viewing up close.

1xRun: Why should people buy this piece?
Daryll Peirce:  Hopefully because it stirs something in your gut, inspires some contemplation or daydreaming, and you’d like to revisit those feelings often. Maybe certain elements resonate within you or remind you of past experiences? Maybe you like the connection to nature or the city, anatomy, flora, decay, ink work, or another reason. I guess what I’m getting to is because you like it.

Also, all the color you see is hand painted. I started each piece with the black and white print and take each one in a varied direction of color and exploration, so they are truly unique and individually interesting.

1xRun: Describe the print in one gut reaction word.
Daryll Peirce: Balance.

Or The Bad News First… by Daryll Peirce

1xRun: When did you first start making art?  What was your first piece?
Daryll Peirce:  Some of my earliest memories are of making art. I can’t remember my first piece, so I’ll just talk about a 12 or so page book I remember creating full of fictional monster truck names and drawings. My favorite was “Fly-N-Hi” which was drawn crushing my school bus at the time. I later made shirts of that illustration when I first learned to silkscreen.

Fly-N-High by Daryll Peirce

1xRun: What artists inspired you early on and who inspires you now?    
Daryll Peirce:  When I was a kid I was heavily influenced by occasional trips to San Francisco, which seemed like the emerald city over the hill. But, been more so through summer trips to stay with family in NYC, going to a museums and just walking through the streets overflowing with bubble-lettered and character based graffiti in the mid to late 80’s boom. I also had a couple fortunate school trips through Western Europe and being exposed to art-history and the art world outside of Reno completely blew my mind. My parents were supportive, but just not into visual art. My high school at the time had one “art” class that you could take and from what I hear, that may be sadly gone now. I worked late after school one day and my teacher showed me images from Michaelangelo, DaVinci, and other renaissance artists as well as Van Gogh and a handful of impressionists and a few contemporaries. Basically a travel-brochure peek at art history. I remember her saying that she could get in trouble because the works, such as David, the Sistine Chapel, or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus  featured nudity. She was awesome and I’m appalled by the ignorance of art education or appreciation in such conservative public school systems.

Goya

On one trip to San Francisco my older cousin was looking at H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon book. He got in trouble from his Dad and I remember the words satanic and evil being thrown around. I was maybe 12 and the whole scene spooked me and I think the art actually scared me‚ how cool is that! Perhaps it resonated within me and led to my interest in the macabre. Dali also would play a big role after his discovery toward the end of high school.   In college Tolouse-Latrec, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch, Goya’s Black Paintings and dark sketches equally inspired me alongside emerging California artists of the time like Dos Green and Dave Kinsey.  As for current working artists‚ Darren Waterston, Herbert Baglione, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Schoultz, Mel Kadel, Brett Amory, Logan Hicks, Gregory Euclid, and Jim Darling are a handful of artists who come to mind. I’m a big enough fan of all their work and I’m sure they’ve influenced me on some level.

1xRun: Do you listen to music while you work? If so what? If not then what is your environment like when you work?
Daryll Peirce:   Since music has became so accessible digitally my collection has become quite eclectic and it gets kind of freaky up in here. It all sort of depends on the stage of the work or a need to stay awake. I can’t really listen to any lyrics when I’m concepting and sketching because of the conflicting need to sing along in my head or aloud. I rarely get to sit with a book anymore and sometimes I want to enjoy a long story that accompanies me for my own journey into a new piece so I often listen to audio books or play documentary movies in the background. If I have a 5 or 6 hour book to listen to, then I have to listen all the way through and it helps to keep me working and focused. iTunes on shuffle does the opposite.

1xRun: If you could collaborate with any living artist who would it be and why?
Daryll Peirce:  Anselm Kiefer comes to mind. The massive scale along with the physical and cerebral weight of his work is incredibly humbling. I’ve been getting into more sculptural work, welding, etc and his use of lead and heavy metals alongside grass and natural ephemeral materials is really inspiring.   

Anselm Kiefer

1xRun: If you could collaborate with any deceased artists who would it be and why?
Daryll Peirce: Man, how do you even answer something like that? Probably DaVinci. I’d like to see the have a conversation with him and brainstorm on future technologies and philosophise on past and future civilizations.   

1xRun: What was the first piece of art that you bought? Do you still have it?
Daryll Peirce: I bought a painting from an unknown artist on a Euro-skateboarding trip. It cost $200 or so which was 1/3 of my 3 week budget. I lugged that thing around from squat to squat, trains, planes, etc. Sadly it got destroyed in a flood.

1xRun: What was the last piece of art that you bought?
Daryll Peirce:  I got “OMG” from Helen Bayly from her show at Lopo Gallery here in SF. Something about capturing the ridiculousness of our time and the texting “newspeak” we’re all dumbing down to had me smiling. It also reminds me of the downfall of great ancient Roman and Greek civilizations in comparison to our current world superpower position.

OMG by Helen Bayly (Right)

1xRun: What else have you been up to? What else do you have on the horizon?
Daryll Peirce:  I’ll have a large installation in a juried exhibition at 5 Claude Lane gallery in San Francisco that opens on October 4th and currently have a handful of small works at in Hellion Gallery in Portland, OR. Something kind of adventurous is on the horizon for Miami/Art Basel this year, but I can’t really say more till I know more, but I’ll have work in a couple spots there. After Miami, I’ll have a 3 person show in January at Lequivive Gallery in Oakland, CA .