Able Parris
Mar 22, 2009
Where do you get your actual materials?
My materials come from old National Geographics, but pre-1990, probably because the color quality is too glossy and too shiny in the newer stuff. And also old illustrated books of animals and any text from any source because I don’t mind it having a shinier crisper quality, but preferably images from any printed material pre-1990
Also, I can’t get too old because the 1960’s and prior is too grainy. When you scan and enlarge, it gets distorted but not in a pretty distorted way, it kind of just looks bad because the printing quality wasn’t great, I don’t use newsprint either. I play around in my sketchbook, but my main goal from there is to scan and enlarge at three times the size so you start to see the moiré patterns and details; the smudges and tears in the paper really come out and look more like fabric when it’s bigger. I don’t turn anything down that’s cheap or free or has an animal or beautiful colors, but it all started with National Geographic.
Were you that kid that decorated your room with magazine ads plastered to the wall?
That’s a funny question because I didn’t start doing art as I know it now, or collage, until about seven years ago and I’m turning thirty this year. As a child I lived in this basement room, at the very back. I had to go through my brother’s room to get to my room. He’s four years older than me so if he was taking a nap and i had to get into my room, I had to go in through his without waking him up. The basement we lived in was unfinished so I had raw sheet rock walls with rafter ceilings, I lived in that room for eight years and I wasn’t even allowed to put a thumbtack in it because my parents wanted to finish the room at some point. When I started remodeling homes as a job, I realized I could have put some thumbtacks in the walls and it wouldn’t have been a problem.
I moved away from Wyoming when I was fifteen and moved to Kansas City. The once my wife and I moved to Rhode Island for her to go to RISD and I was in that environment, I started to play around and collage posters and fliers I found into my sketchbook. I felt like a kid again. I started cutting into things and tearing things and have been doing that ever since.
Tell me about the process for you.
When making something new you know what you’ve made, what you’re afraid of, what you want, the habits you have and the color pallet you always work with. I think a lot of my work has a similar look, and you may be able to see it and say, ‘that’s an Able Parris collage.’ I try to get away from that every time, but I don’t think I do a very good job of it.
I try to start at a different point each time, but there are patterns I definitely fall into. I was noticing a lot of stuff in this slideshow is earth tone, so at one time I must have glued down a pink piece of paper into my sketchbook and said this is pink, I’ll start with that and stop using earth tones. And then if I get too reliant on gluing things down, I’ll paint or I’ll use a pen, just to try to ruin it so I can fix it. Most times it doesn’t work, but that’s the philosophy.
That’s why I put the paper pieces into a book and not on foreign paper, so if I ever use a piece, scan it to do something with it at another time, thats cool, but its just a sketchbook and I’m just playing around. I try not to get too precious with my work, so I create some limitations or a narrative. Some nights I’ll spend watching a movie and cutting things out, not thinking about collage. Something will spark and I’ll glue it down then. If I have a collection of cutouts I can be in the moment with images that I can put together. Or I’ll sift through books and magazines for hours trying to find the one thing that will work. Collage is difficult because it’s not like illustration where you can say ‘This needs an octopus so I’ll just draw one in.’ You have to have these things already that work together – or that may not work together at all, but you have to make it look like they were meant to be together and make sense. Collage speaks the best to what I try and convey.
Could you classify your work into a specific genre of messaging?
Probably two things – imagination and memory. Especially memory – that moment where you’re trying to remember, but things get in the way. You have this mix mash up of what reality is and so the memory becomes something totally different like imagination. That along with a little narrative is what my work is about.
Why did you decide at such a crucial economic time to leave your full time job and start freelancing?
I missed the client interaction and I missed the whole big picture and having a hand in everything. All these projects would come and go, but there was no chance to develop a company’s brand, I was just aiding them in making their website work better. That’s the bigger picture I wanted to be a part of.
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Another Local Chapel Hill Artist!!!
Able Parris has a good sense of depth and color delineation. Keep up the good work mixing contrasting values and textures.
[...] was recently interviewed for The Artery Magazine. This is the first time I have been interviewed in person, which is much different than answering [...]
Very insightful! I met Able when he just moved to Providence and it has been wonderful to see his work blossom.
able’s work reminds me of eduardo recife.
http://www.misprintedtype.com/v4/
what ideas do able parris use in his work?