Jeffery Dell
Jeffery Dell is an artist and printmaker based in Texas. He regularly exhibits around Houston and has shown at the International Print Center New York, The Print Center in Philadelphia, and at various venues abroad.
Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?
There are invariably important moments of play that I engineer into all stages of my process. I may have an idea at the start, but even if I do, it changes. The periods of play are designed to encourage that.
I often make maquettes, which is one way of playing. Instead of “thinking” of the image I want to make, I can interact with the maquettes until I “find” the image. I just don’t see my conscious mind as being particularly good at determining the image from the start. The play allows for other parts of me (the unconscious, the lower levels of the self, etc.) to influence the work. Meaning and content feel much richer to me that way.
Forms are often the first thing, then color (there are some exceptions to this, like when I nearly eliminate form altogether and let layers of color interact). And I don’t generally work out the colors beforehand, instead starting with a general idea but really figuring it out as I go. Even though a lot of screenprinters proof colors beforehand, I don’t. I just start. If a particular print’s color doesn’t work, then it’s discarded.
Where Late and Sweet Birds Sang, 2019.
34 x 23 in (86.36 x 58.42).
Screenprint.
Earthlight, included with this exhibition, started as a maquette. There were two reasons for this: one, for the play and the reasons described above; two, I needed to actually see how the shadows looked in order to get the trompe-l’oeil correct.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am making two parallel or linked directions at the moment. One involves brushy, semi geometric forms that kind of rely on an invisible grid. There’s a tension between the looseness of the brushy forms and the underlying structure. These are then screenprinted in such a way that the brushiness is preserved or even heightened in the print.
The second direction is very similar, except without the brushy texture. This parallel direction, in fact, was started (or “discovered”) by isolating the final two layers of one of the brushy forms onto a blank sheet. This is a classic to printmaking: that a small number of printed layers, when seen alone, have a power that was not anticipated. The first direction technically has a lot of complexity and printed layers; the second is only a few layers.
I’d like both of the above to be shown together, to be seen as feeding each other. I’m working that out, but I’m not overly worried about it. Among other goals, I like to think of these forms as renderings of entirely imagined three-dimensional forms and spaces. I mix perspectival rendering and other forms of depicting space, particularly isometric. These are systems used to conceptualize and “see” depth on a two-dimensional surface. By mixing these up, I hope to gently point back to the mind itself, the viewer’s mind as much as my own, as a means to watch ourselves watching, to notice how our own “seeing” is as much projection from inside our heads as it is raw data entering our eyeballs.
I don’t want to say the work is “about” human perception. I don’t want to say what the work is about at all (I may not even know). But I do think a lot about human perception, and I expend energy to notice how and why I see what I think I see.
Printmaking always lends itself to its materials. Can you talk about your specific choice of working on transparent paper?
Trouble Twister, 2019.
34 x 23 in (86.36 x 58.42).
Screenprint.
The Yupo translucent I often print on is like a sort of pristine frosted mylar. It’s smooth but not slick. It’s frosted but translucent. It shows every detail (and flaw) of the printing process. The translucent Yupo allows me to create a slight color glow around forms, either by printing color directly onto the back of the print, or by having a second sheet of paper and color behind it. The effect can be very subtle or fairly strong (but it is almost always difficult to photograph). I like to use it subtly enough that a viewer might feel uncertain they are actually seeing it. I tend to think of people today as “post-Albers:” generally aware that the presence of one color can make us “see” a second. I hope there are moments people expect to see a particular color effect, but that the effect is countered (or exaggerated) by the actual glow around a form.
In Earthlight, the print included in this exhibition, there is a slight orange glow around the illusionistic cut holes in the image.
What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?
One of the graphic traditions that I repeatedly return to is the Japanese Ukiyo-E period, roughly 1700-1890. I really treasure how so much of the work mixes the flat and dimensional, the realistic and the stylized, the narrative and the formal. Many other graphic traditions also mix flat and dimensional too; it seems to be something about prints that engenders this.
For contemporary art, I follow closely the work of Erin O’Keefe. Her photographs of painted objects really arrive at a fascinating balance of flat and dimensional. I’m always more confounded by my own perceptions after looking at her work.
Where are some of your favorite spaces that support contemporary art or design? Now that the art has an online presence has that changed?
The End of All Songs (b), 2019.
34 x 23 in (86.36 x 58.42).
Screenprint.
In spite of how much a rely on the internet to look at stuff, I’d like to mention some physical spaces close to where I live in Texas. Big Medium, in Austin, has pretty consistently brought great activity and artists. MASS Gallery, an artist-run cooperative and also in Austin, has done the same. There have been so many shows I’ve seen at these two spaces that have introduced me to artists from outside of Texas that I might not have learned about. In San Antonio, Artpace is a world-class residency program and exhibition space. So many times, I’ve gone to talks there and been floored by the quality of work and thinking.
Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?
I have a two-person show coming up in January 2022, with the artist Rand Renfrow. It will be at the Georgetown Art Center. We’re working with certain games for the collaboration, like I build a maquette, pass it to him, and let him render it as he wants. There will also be fluctuations in systems of rendering space. Provisionally, the show will be titled, Three Ways of Knowing the Same Thing. Although it’s a two-person show, the three in the title refers to him, me, and the collaboration.
Jeffery Dell’s work is included in our show “Illuminated,” July 9th - Aug. 30th, 2021. Visit his Instagram (@dellpesce) and his website to see more of his work.