Artist Arrington de Dionyso is drawing’s marathon man
Creation process shown in 24 hours
In the first couple of hours, he’s just getting his bearings. By the sixth or seventh hour, he has hit his creative stride. And by the 12th hour?
“I’m probably pretty incoherent,” admits drawer/ musician Arrington de Dionyso while talking about his latest artistic endeavour, The 24 Hour Drawing Performance. True to its name, de Dionyso will be drawing in two continuous 12-hour blocks over two days, both open to the public. Curious onlookers will be able to witness the sensitive creation process that artists like de Dionyso usually tend to keep private.
De Dionyso views these performances not only as a way to get comfortable sharing with others, but as a challenge. “Hopefully by hour 12,” he says, “the more rational side of my brain will have had some time to shut down. It’s very meditative, a beautiful place to be. It’s the essence of creativity itself.”
During our phone conversation he was still buzzing about the 24-hour performance, his second ever, that he had just completed in his hometown of Olympia, Wash. Although physically and mentally exhausting — he’s not depriving himself of food, drink or sleep during these performances — he was successfully able to draw his favourite erotic and mythological motifs intuitively. The Japanese sumi ink and acrylic pigments flowed onto a variety of uniquely textured paper types he picked up from a distributor of discarded art supplies.
“I made the decision a month ago I would take a drawing fast and not do any visual work whatsoever leading up to the performance,” he explains, adding that he’s now committed to only drawing at 24-hour performances this year. “It was inspired by a session I did in Brussels last March, where I had to create an art show in a day, except that one wasn’t open to the public. This time I thought, why not make it open, and why not have a bar?”
As the former front-growler for experimental blues outfit Old Time Relijun and currently as a horn-playing solo artist who can also sing in self-taught Indonesian, the 38-year-old is no stranger to plying his trade in front of crowds.
“I don’t claim to be purely synesthetic,” he says, “but I do feel a sense of connection between the sound waves in my music with the way I draw.” There aren’t too many parallels to be drawn from his music and visual sides, although he’s always trying to combine the two.
One instance where his artistic self as a whole was irrevocably altered was a transcendent six-week trip to Indonesia in 2011. He had spent considerable time building long-distance relationships with artists he wanted to collaborate with, and once there discovered his Indonesian contemporaries lacked the pretensions of his Western peers.
“Almost all of the artists I met there make music, too, and they see what they do, whether sound or visual, as part of a continuum,” he says. “For them, making art is like eating, drinking, breathing — it’s something you do. It doesn’t set you on some high pedestal apart from the world, it’s just part of living a full and satisfying life.”
In that spirit, de Dionyso ultimately hopes to create an “immersive environment” during these performances. His finished works will hang alongside projections of his travels, and he’ll be bringing his homemade woodwinds for impromptu jams when he’s mentally blocked. As for what will become of the finished pictures, he’s a little more unsure, although he hopes to sell a few in an auction format.