Kyler Dannels

Heap of gold, heap of...

2011-03-01T12:07:00.005-05:00

When you have all the physical resources in the civilized world, time is the dragon's treasure. When you face the dragon alone and are forced to sneak behind it stealing one piece at a time, the treasure transforms into energy and motivation.

If you can't find single crumbs in either of its forms, the treasure is faith and the dragon seems insurmountable.

Its most terrible powers are psychic. It will enter your mind and consume the accomplishments of your entire journey, making you believe it was all for nothing and that you have really not moved at all.

Progress on the last things, until the next things:

New Studio

2010-10-21T19:50:00.014-04:00

Some of these have already appeared on my Twitter account. Now that I have the space, I've been toying with developing multiple works at the same time - hence everything being unfinished.

Everything is shot with my iPhone, apologies for bad photo quality.

Crop, work in progress.
20" x 30" Carbon pencil on Rives BFK

Lost sketching.

"Juárez" unfinished
30" x 46" Carbon pencil, compressed charcoal on Stonehenge

"The First Dream" unfinished
46" x 30" Carbon pencil, compressed charcoal on Stonehenge

Unfinished Hollis Brown study number three.
30" x 20" Latex on canvas

Unfinished Hollis Brown study number four.
40" x 30" Latex on canvas

And an older one - Study from a procession in Spain.
14" x 14" Oil on board

Drawing

2010-06-29T00:49:00.005-04:00

Did some portrait drawing with Señor Mclean the other night.

Another Fourth of July...

2010-03-09T01:02:00.004-05:00

I spent my Sunday attending a figure drawing session in Los Alamos, a town one hour North of Santa Fe where they've designed and built nuclear weapons for about sixty-seven years. It's a small mountain town that every time I visit seems to resonate a strange and ominous energy in my chest and ears. The majority of the cities population is employed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which has a total staff of somewhere around twelve-thousand five-hundred people. One lady drawing with us had worked at the Lab for over twenty years.

I drove up from Santa Fe through rain and snowfall at around nine in the morning with fellow artists McLean Kendree and Sean Closson in tow. I spent my time drawing multiple sheets of paper until around three in the afternoon (with a one hour pause to devourer some lunch and coffee). This image is the sketch I devoted the most time to. It's interesting to see our (predictably) different interpretations of the same model in the same pose.

Around one to one and a half hours, 11" x 14" Wolffs-Carbon pencil on white Rives BFK.

And onward...

2010-03-06T00:54:00.003-05:00

Just playing around a bit to get the muscles working again. They can not teach you the juggling act that is adult living in art schools.

After Curtis: Haschebaad Mask

2010-01-12T12:00:00.000-05:00

Never finished this one.
Time to move on.

After Curtis: Old Woman

2010-01-05T12:00:00.000-05:00

Harder to depart from the source, in this one. The photograph had enough drama in it's own right.

Wolffs-Carbon and White Charcoal pencil on gray Rives BFK paper, 16" x 22"

The Evening Redness in the West

2010-01-01T12:00:00.000-05:00

Snapped some phone shots of a few quick little Nu-Pastel character studies of Judge Holden from Blood Meridian. I haven't settled on his actual look yet, the finals will probably contain none of the sketch designs. It's going to be a major challenge to depict the ultra serious, old testament quality of the book in picture form.

"The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him."

After Curtis: Hopi Dancer

2009-12-25T12:00:00.002-05:00

I've been inspired some of the Edward Curtis photographs that we have at the gallery I'm working at (not to mention inspired by living in the Southwest in general) so I decided to do a series of studies.
Sometimes it's nice to have the source material and just take off running, and sometimes it's hard to let myself depart from what I'm looking at and let the drawing be spontaneous. This was easier in most of the previous drawings that were created straight from my head and hand through a process of feeling it out and leaving the history.

Wolffs-Carbon and White Charcoal pencil on gray Rives BFK paper, 22" x 30"

Bent.

2009-12-22T12:00:00.000-05:00

Quick sketch on Bristol paper, Wolffs-Carbon pencil.

Feast of Unicorns

2009-12-18T13:51:00.003-05:00

Qwest internet service has been wrangled.

14" x 11" - Ebony pencil on Bristol paper

Calamity!

2009-11-16T11:50:00.004-05:00

It's true, I have no Internet connection. It's terrible for all of us, I know. Rest assured, hope is cresting the horizon, brilliant and juicy.
I make no claims of fecundity, I must only say:

I'll be back.

"it"

2009-09-10T04:50:00.002-04:00

"It" is that precious quality which lets you make artwork which is better than good and sometimes "it" allows for work which is truly inspired. I learned early on, you can't rely on "it" to get you out of a mess. It is capricious and wispy, disappearing for periods at a time, sometimes only half returning, or returning for only half as long as you need it. It's also a problem to have to work without "it". That is killer. Too much of that kind of thing will sink you into a strange kind of self-loathing, hard to describe, but which makes it hard to face yourself in the mirror. And sometimes it just inexplicably goes away. But you can get "it" to come and stay with you when you have great discipline and work hard without distractions. That is why I've always liked working for three days straight, and why I built a trapdoor for "it" so it can come and go quickly when I lose the three day luxury. I find if you keep working until "it" comes back, "it" always does eventually. It eventually gets curious and wants to see what you've been doing while it was away. When I'm feeling most discouraged, and begin thinking I've lost it, I recognize this as simply the lowest ebb of the process of making art and ride it out."

- Paul Pope

The Suicide Kid

2009-08-24T23:29:00.002-04:00

A quick portrait of the writer Charles Bukowski drawn from an old photograph. I may come back and bring the hands up to the same level as the face, we'll see.

16 x 24 white Rives BFK
(© credit to the original photographer, whoever you are.)

"nobody would help me
die as
the drinks kept
coming,
as the next day
waited for me
with its steel clamps,
its stinking
anonymity,
its incogitant
attitude."

Lack of updates.. (edit: 6/12)

2009-04-02T02:14:00.004-04:00

Been slacking on the art updates, I'm working on some larger projects that are taking a lot of boring development and some experimental paintings that aren't worth showing just yet. Here's a crop of another large drawing that isn't quite completed.
(Edit: Posted up a shot showing the rest of that drawing, it's about 18 inches tall.)

Thanks for stopping in, more stuff real soon!

Wanderlust Photography

2009-03-23T04:08:00.011-04:00

I've been spending a lot of time traveling and admittedly don't have very much new drawing and painting as a result. What I do have is about 3000 photographs. On this trip I put some effort into taking pictures just for the sake of pictures. Here are a few shots from Oklahoma, New Mexico and Colorado.
(Note: a couple of these were shot by Larissa, who also provided the nice SLR I was shooting with.)

Drifting from door to door...

2009-02-18T04:50:00.002-05:00

Sketching late with the ebony pencil, tonight..

"Self-Portrait as Forgotten Old Man, Age 22"

2009-01-14T01:18:00.003-05:00

Rives BFK, 18x24, Wolfe Carbon Pencil

Detail

Two ink sketches...

2009-01-10T23:41:00.001-05:00

Some drawings of people sitting in the airport.

More studio shots...

2009-01-10T22:58:00.005-05:00

Working on a portrait painting:

Tools of the trade:

=

While flying to Spain...

2009-01-06T15:56:00.004-05:00

Doing some sketching out of my head while traveling inspired by the Explosions In the Sky album "Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever" which has this subtitle on the cover that says "Help Us Stay Alive".

I decided to just start posting all the things I have piled up over the next several days rather than making one massive post with everything.

European Adventure

2008-12-29T19:24:00.003-05:00

Here's a little drawing until I can get together the rest of my photos and sketches and make a larger post related to my trip overseas.

Hope everyone is well, it's taken me about 5 hours straight to go through the 700 blog entries I've been missing!

Hiatus.

2008-11-18T04:30:00.003-05:00

Here's a few studio shots before I go out of the country. I'm off to Portugal, France, Czech Republic and Spain with my girlfriend Larissa for 4 weeks - going to soak up as much art as possible and have a great time.
I've been experimenting quite a bit, if you'll forgive the complete inconsistency I've been showing lately - Hopefully I'll have some pieces that make sense in their complete forms, soon.

(this one is old but never posted, quick portrait of Ghostface from his Fishscale album)

Thanks for your time! Updates when I get home!

Welcome, ghosts

2008-10-18T02:43:00.003-04:00

Lost Eskimo - sumi ink, white acrylic, and a paper bag I found on the floor - on bristol paper

Killing all the flies

2008-10-18T01:22:00.003-04:00

"Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working."
- Stephen DeStaebler

Boring machines disturb sleep

2008-10-16T05:20:00.004-04:00

Felt like doing an old fashioned fully rendered pencil drawing tonight... Forgot how time consuming that is, so it's unfinished.

Alien/Creature thingy, 11x14 bristol, 2B staedler pencil

Couple..

2008-10-15T03:40:00.003-04:00

Snapshots of some recent little head sketches...

Playing with those new Golden Open Acrylics - they are really cool, the blobs I put out yesterday on a random piece of board are still not dry at all -

Some charcoal and nu-pastel -

Hope everyone is well.

New web site!

2008-09-10T19:52:00.004-04:00

http://www.kylerdannels.com/

I've finally launched a new web site with my recent work that I can update more easily and use to display a larger range of content.
In the next update I'll upload the Sketchbook section, some recent paintings (including the final to the conversation drawing I uploaded) and a link to an online store, which I will also link here.

I'm currently working on gallery pieces, updating all of my promotional materials (like the web site and blog) and I'm filming and editing a local television show on the Atlanta metal scene. I'll keep everyone up to date as events occur.
Thanks a lot to everyone who is keeping track of what I'm doing!

Still living.

2008-09-02T03:34:00.004-04:00

Coming soon: Midget trolls swinging giant axes into automobiles.

Some process.

2008-07-10T02:40:00.005-04:00

I thought I would post up a few of the tight line drawings from the finals I've been doing here at the academy. The first two you've seen the paintings, the other one is for the "conversation" assignment given by CF Payne. It's some fellows on a life raft lost at sea, arguing a certain moral dilemma. These are all col-erase pencil on tracing paper. I'll post up new paintings as soon as I can. I'm trying to get my web site and a bunch of other promo things ready for San Diego Comic Con on top of having two academy assignments this week, so I'm stretched pretty thin for the time being.

Here are some thumbnails that are actually more little drawings than anything for the conversation piece. My initial process is usually never this developed (my thumbnails are mostly just scribbles with some value and shapes), I was just having fun drawing this time around.

Illustration Academy Pt. 1

2008-06-21T01:42:00.004-04:00

I'm behind on tying up a lot of loose ends and I do apologize. I need to get books to a lot of people that requested them, I need to get the web site up and finished and put the finished story there, I need to do the next edition of the book with better alignment and hopefully utterly void of typos and bad grammar, and I need to bring people up to date via the blog. For right now the best I can do is to touch on the latter.

I'm about to finish my third week of the The Illustration Academy here at Ringling, and it has already been an intense and profound experience. You can see some photos of our class over at George Pratt's fantastic art blog. I'll try to post the finished assignments up as I do them from here on out, but here are the first two for now.

The first assignment is a "slice of life" picture focused on Sarasota assigned by the illustration legend Mark English. The constraints are that we are only allowed to use two colors per shape, it must be a square, it should be somewhat positive and there is no rendering what so ever allowed. The idea is that basic design, value and color become the top priorities over any kind of polish and fluff.

For my piece I decided to focus on two guys that I had seen many times driving through an area of Sarasota known as "New Town" that sit and sell watermelons out of the back of a truck on the weekends. I had actually bought a watermelon from them once before and had plenty of inspiration to draw from. For the final piece I opted to shoot reference of a couple friends of mine (dressing one up in overalls and stuffing a pillow down the front) and to imitate the situation I had devised in my little thumbnail sketch from memory.
The final was acrylic on illustration board, and the painting technique I used was a little homage to the great illustrator J.C. Leyendecker

The second assignment, given to us by one of my early heroes Jon Foster, was to create an illustration portrait based on a literary character of our choice, with a strong focus on a particular emotion, rather than any high conceptual ideas.

For mine I chose to portray the character Jurgis Rudkus from the book "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. I wanted to make it feel extremely gritty and oppressive for my emotional focus. The final was acrylic and oil paint on illustration board.

More to come soon.

Senior Project: Between Me and Them

2008-04-28T02:57:00.013-04:00

Here is my artist statement:

My greatest inspirations have always shared one aspect in common: dramatic narrative. This consistency of emotional content has always permeated the creations that fuel my passion for art. A story will hold your attention and secure itself in your memory like nothing else can. Stories compose our greatest myths, religions and philosophies. It is this belief in the power of narrative that drives me to tell my own stories. I am striving to honestly reveal qualities that are unique unto to my experience and my thoughts. This desire represents a major component of my goals in visual art, as well as in my relatively new passion for writing.

This body of work represents my first step towards exploring my own self-generated narratives and interests. Every image presented corresponds to a particular written work that I have authored. The written pieces range from biographical accounts, to ensembles of real world inspiration, to straight fiction. All of the artwork was created with the text in mind and with the goal of designing a fully illustrated, tangible book. The color palettes, textures, figures and full gamut of design decisions should reflect the atmospheres, emotions, and details presented in the narratives. My intention was to create something comprehensive that through its many different facets and through its narrative content could be appreciated on a timeless, human level.

Kyler Dannels

Here are selections from the body of my thesis work. The color paintings are mostly acrylic on illustration board and the grayscale images are all black and white ink on Gray Rives BFK paper:

Here are some quick shots of the book that I made. I'm going to shortly make this available online and if anyone is interested in purchasing it. I also still have copies available here if anyone is on campus and wants one. They are 20 dollars a piece and 87 pages in full color. They contain short stories and poems all written by myself, that all artwork is based on. I designed the whole book myself in Adobe InDesign with some help from my teacher Mike Hodges and the wizard graphic designer Willy Diaz.

Thank you so much to everyone who came to the show and especially to those of you who have seen fit to buy a copy of the book. It's not perfect, but I hope you enjoy it.

Another spot

2008-04-09T09:26:00.001-04:00

Time is running out.

Another spot

2008-04-07T15:27:00.002-04:00

Black and white ink on grey Rives BFK

Preview

2008-02-06T14:37:00.002-05:00

Spot illustration that is part of my senior project.

Black and white ink on Grey Rives BFK, all brush

I'll maybe post some crops of the paintings, at some point. Look for the new sketchbook post soon.

Art trade

2008-01-31T21:43:00.000-05:00

Tampa artist Brandon Dunlop recently did a portrait of me that is now hanging in my living room, so I did a portrait of him and his dog to return the favor.

12x16, black and white ink on Grey Rives BFK mounted on cradled panel.

Pop.

2008-01-12T23:55:00.000-05:00

Started photographing some of the bigger pieces from last semester. Acrylic on Board, 18 x 40.

Welcome the new year

2007-12-31T20:13:00.001-05:00

My senior self portrait.

Self-Portrait

2007-12-10T00:48:00.001-05:00

Oil on board around 20 inches, I think.

"Thou Art That"

2007-07-13T01:36:00.001-04:00

"Artists share the calling, according to their disciplines and crafts, to cast the new images of mythology. That is, they provide the contemporary metaphors that allow us to realize the transcendent, infinite, and abundant nature of being as it is. Their metaphors are the essential elements of the symbols that make manifest the radiance of the world just as it is, rather than arguing that it should be one way or the other. They reveal it as it is."

- Joseph Campbell

Pen & Ink - "The Long Rain"

2007-04-20T19:48:00.000-04:00

A pen and ink for the story that I posted bits of previously.

"The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton. Only the teeth were white, and they shone like a strange white bracelet dropped half through a clenched black fist."

Most critical inspirational images, ever.

2007-04-13T00:35:00.000-04:00

These are the images that contain the qualities I most want to achieve with my work. They are important to me because of the emotions they invoke, and for their conceptual basis, more so than the techniques/application of materials. I'll make that post later.

Repin - The most recent favorite.

Pratt

Unknown

Francis Bacon

Odd Nerdrum

Goya

Hussar

Arisman - This is only one selection out of pretty much all his work.

The one James Jean image that really gets to me for more than technique.

Kollwitz

A Ringling grad, Brian Berassi

Nivbed

Like Arisman, these are just a few of the images of Beksinski's that I am in love with. He gets to me in that deep, passionate, haunting way - but he does it with fantasy subject matter, painted realistically enough that a person can connect with it on a base human level. I have a massive respect for this, even though I definately do not want to paint this way.

Caspar David Friedrich

Gericault

This entire etching series had a profound effect on me during precollege when I was still in high school. Goya's "Disasters of War". Each image caries a small phrase, translated from Spanish.

This one is part of a few titled "They Do Not Want To" or "They Do Not Agree", the following are more of the same, with the titles progressing as "Nor Do They" and "Or These".

I hope this is helpful in some way, to people, and it not, for my own memory, then. I would love to see everyone make similar posts. And if anyone has pieces similar to this stuff to recommend, that would be great.

More.

2007-04-13T00:30:00.000-04:00

Excerpts from "The Long Rain" by Ray Bradbury.

It was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soul and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

And, as they stood, from a distance they heard a roar.
And the monster came out of the rain.
The monster was supported upon a thousand electric blue legs. It walked swiftly and terribly. It struck down a leg with a driving blow. Everywhere a leg struck a tree fell and burned. Great whiffs of ozone filled the rainy air, and smoke blew away and was broken up by the rain. The monster was half-mile wide and a mile high and it felt of the ground like a great blind thing. Sometimes, for a moment, it had no legs at all. And then, in an instant, a thousand whips would fall out of its belly, white-blue whips, to sting the jungle.

The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton. Only the teeth were white, and they shone like a strange white bracelet dropped half through a clenched black fist.

Pickard screamed. He fired off his gun six times at the night sky. In the flashes of powdery illumination they could see armies of rain drops, suspended as in a vast motionless amber, for an instant, hesitating as if shocked by the explosion, fifteen billion droplets, fifteen billion tears, fifteen billion ornaments, jewels standing out against a white velvet viewing board. And then, with the light gone, the drops which had waited to have their pictures taken, which had suspended their downward rush, fell upon them, stinging, in an insect cloud of coldness and pain.

I'm currently working on an illustration for this story. Hope I can live up to it, even slightly.

Random chunks of text

2007-04-13T00:24:00.000-04:00

Jeff Watts:

If someone comes up to you and says they can speak six different languages-- German, French, etc.-- everyone is so impressed. "Oh my God! I can't believe you speak six languages." But if you come up to somebody say you speak twelve visual languages, people go, "Huh? What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. Aren't you just gifted with that and born with the ability to draw and paint like that?" No. You see, it takes thousands and thousands of hours to train and memorize. So it's getting people to understand that art language is an aptitude, like someone has an aptitude for math or English. It still has to be cultivated like someone was teaching you a language, and I think that's where a lot of the schools and the students go wrong. They think they can master right away. You know, I tell people when they come in for a ten-week course, "What would you learn in a French class in ten weeks other than it sounds really weird and that the conjugations are crazy?" I mean, you'd learn "bonjour" and that would be about it.

Web Site

2007-03-12T02:44:00.000-04:00

Finally put something together...

http://www.kylerdannels.com/

I know it looks like a legal assistant.... But so does my business card, and I just matched that design. It will have to do for now.

NYC here I come, mother bitches.

Monotypes. (2)

2007-02-12T02:49:00.000-05:00

Monotypes.

2007-02-12T02:44:00.000-05:00

Sketch

2007-02-04T17:23:00.000-05:00

Portrait night - More to come, soon.

The Art Market

2007-01-07T17:59:00.000-05:00

The Banksy show.

http://supertouchblog.com/?p=317

(for some reason the link tag is not working, so copy-paste)

I must discuss... Things... Soon. But not now.

One more...

2006-12-16T01:11:00.000-05:00

Quick mixed media piece - Sleep deprivation is a beautiful thing

2006-09-20T01:49:00.000-04:00

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
Igor Stravinsky

Kyler Dannels

Heap of gold, heap of...

New Studio

Drawing

Another Fourth of July...

And onward...

After Curtis: Haschebaad Mask

After Curtis: Old Woman

The Evening Redness in the West

After Curtis: Hopi Dancer

Bent.

Feast of Unicorns

Calamity!

"it"

The Suicide Kid

Lack of updates.. (edit: 6/12)

Wanderlust Photography

Drifting from door to door...

"Self-Portrait as Forgotten Old Man, Age 22"

Two ink sketches...

More studio shots...

While flying to Spain...

European Adventure

Hiatus.

Welcome, ghosts

Killing all the flies

Boring machines disturb sleep

Couple..

New web site!

Still living.

Some process.

Illustration Academy Pt. 1

Senior Project: Between Me and Them

Another spot

Another spot

Preview

Art trade

Pop.

Welcome the new year

Self-Portrait

More reading...

"Thou Art That"

Pen & Ink - "The Long Rain"

Most critical inspirational images, ever.

More.

Random chunks of text

Web Site

Monotypes. (2)

Monotypes.

Sketch

The Art Market

One more...