An Interview with Alex Pardee
Alex Pardee is a freelance artist who is probably best known for his work on a number of stunning album covers. But along the way he has also designed and created comic books, launched a web store, and has begun stepping deeper into the online world of NFTs.
The Whale Community had the honor of hosting an interview with Alex where he touched on many subjects, including…
His Origins as an Artist
The short version is that I was always kind of interested in art when I was little. I was always kind of like, doodling Sunday comics and Garfield and that kind of stuff. But, when I was growing up being an artist wasn’t considered a profession that you had a good chance at doing, so it was never really that much of an emphasis. But when I was 14, I was struggling really hard with depression and anxiety. I had a chemical imbalance and I was in the hospital, actually, for a little while. And during that time, I was trying to do as much as I could to, like, get distracted, you know. Like, nothing was really making me feel better, so I was just trying to, I was trying to do different things. Playing sports and this and that. And nothing was making me feel better. And all the while I was trying to take medicine as well. But one night I just kind of, like, picked up a pencil and started scribbling and before I knew it, two hours had gone by and I felt I wasn’t thinking about being sick. So that was kind of like the moment where I was just like, okay, I don’t know if this is something that’ll be forever, but as long as this kind of creative process makes me feel better, I’m just gonna do it! And so that was kind of the moment where I just started doing art. Was about when I was 14 or 15 and I just, you know, from there got some art books that were made for five-year-olds and just tried to stay focused on learning from the ground up. And then eventually kind of just running with it in my own way.
The Colorfully Grotesque
That is like a culmination of of my influences I think growing up. I was fascinated by horror movies, even as a seven-year-old. I think my parents were pretty liberal as far as what I could watch. So I love, I absolutely loved horror movies. And around the mid-80s was when I started noticing, as a kid, like a bunch of kind of more demented type of art. That’s when Garbage Pail Kids were out, that’s when skateboard graphics were like, first introduced as being these weird, you know, monstrous stuff. So I think these brightly colored demented takes on pop culture, and just kind of like, stuff that I’d never seen before, well always kind of played a part in later on, what I was influenced by.
I didn’t really find what I was interested in painting and drawing for a while. But once I kind of settled in it, I realized that I liked confusing people with my art. I love that when I would draw or paint something that was just completely out of my imagination and it was something that like, I thought was cool, you know, back in the late 90s or so. The reaction that I would get, whether I would show it to friends or people would see it or whatever, is like ‘Oh that’s confusing because it’s like, it’s like gross or it’s unsettling but it’s brightly colored, so it’s pretty, so I’m just like confused and I don’t know if I like it!’ And so I liked that reaction and I just kind of kept running with it! I definitely fuse kind of these contrasting, you know, things, where you don’t really know how to feel. Like, is it scary, or is it happy, I don’t know!
Merging Traditional and Digital Art
That [the Aesop Rock Album cover] is kind of a good representation of how I’ve been kind of fusing together traditional and digital stuff to kind of create stuff that I couldn’t normally create traditionally. Which is why I’m getting into the the digital and crypto space. Because so much of my process now involves both traditional and digital techniques. So I had a lot of fun with that project and we just built that from the ground up. I think that cover alone took probably close to a thousand hours.
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So I was driven to that kind of emotion based paintings. Which a lot of my older paintings have splattery effects and and really kind of harsh watercolor messes and drips. But that’s something, that no matter how much the technology is there, you can’t emulate those, that emotion, right. It’s all kind of technical. So what I do is, I’ll do a lot of like, traditional textures and kind of splatters and ink work traditionally, in separate pieces of paper. And then I’ll kind of scan all those together and I’ll composite them over like a an ink drawing. So then I start with, like it kind of sounds weird but it’s basically like, I’ll make a seven layer burrito or something. So I have these watercolor textures beneath it and then a real traditional ink drawing on top of it. And then I can go in into Photoshop and into these other programs and actually fill in the spaces and separate out the textures and put some more colors on there and lighting and stuff. So it just really, like by the time I’m done, a lot of the traditional stuff kind of falls to the background. But it’s what is the base for how I kind of decide where lines are going to go and where things are going to form.
Starting his Art Career
I went through a few different phases and I’ll kind of just briefly touch on them, but i really wanted to do comic books. In the 90s, I sent submissions to every comic book publisher. Every single publisher just denied it and denied it and which is, in hindsight, it’s fine. Because all of them were just like, ‘You need better training, you don’t have good skills.’ and it’s like, I don’t, right. So I mean, I didn’t and that’s fine, but I really wanted to be a conference artist. So I just decided I didn’t like rejection. So I was just like, all right, I’ll do it myself! So I started a publishing company in the mid 90s and ended up just self-publishing my own comics. That had, you know, little, tiny distribution, but it gave myself, like a goal and a task and a way to kind of learn the ins and out of the business aspect. And from there it went from, okay well how am I going to promote these comics, I better learn the internet, better learn how to build a website, and better this and this. And then it’s like oh I need to learn how to make t-shirts to sell this to support this. I started doing everything myself and then from there, I kind of was like, well I need supplemental income if I’m gonna do this. So I’ll just take any art job possible. So for the first few years I was just doing local band flyers, anything that i could. You wanted a flyer for your bakery? I’ll do it, you know! And those are 20–30$ jobs, but the main, the main big job that I think really kind of catapulted me into taking it seriously, was in 2003. Late 2003 I got hired by Warner Brothers in a band called The Used to be their art director. So like at that point, I had had a couple of bigger gigs and like comic book stuff and and illustration gigs. And I was still kind of doing my own publishing company stuff. But what that did, by working with The Used and working on this huge, you know, immediately gold selling album in 2004, it opened my audience to a group of of kids that were as impressionable as I was when I saw The Max. So like, all of a sudden I had a whole new base of impressionable 15 and 16 year old kids that were just like, “I want to do art now because of this!” And it was such a cool feeling that it just kind of, like, that cemented me of more being, like, all right, I’m going to push this. And I’m going to kind of, I want to keep, you know, pushing myself and being equally inspired by these people that say they’re inspired by me.
On Balancing Art and Work
Yeah, that’s always been a struggle for me. I think that was probably the hardest thing for me to kind of cope with being an artist was that, like, there’s not a measurable level of success. It’s not like a career where you can be a doctor, where you you go to med school and you know after eight years you’re a doctor. It’s like, as an artist, there’s no finish line. I feel like I’m always just, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to be. I have no idea where I’m going to be in five years. I have no idea what the economy is going to be like. I have no idea what art’s going to be like. I have no idea if they’re going to have, like, if everybody’s going to be working in virtual reality, if I need to learn that right now! Like, I don’t know!’
So there’s just this kind of like, in my career, it’s been this weird thing where I just feel like I have to sacrifice everything around me. Because there’s my time running out to be successful. That’s the old version. That’s when I was really trying to figure things out. And that did require a lot of personal sacrifices and relationship sacrifices and stuff. But there’s definitely a balance of where you kind of just have to realize — to approach art and learning the same way that you do when you’re 14, 15, to 16 years old. Where there’s not really a concept of time running out. You’re just like ‘Oh, I’m gonna do this because I like doing it’, and you don’t think about like, ‘Well, what if it takes me three days? What happens if I miss a phone call in two days?’ That’s like, it’s such a shitty way to approach things. So if it’s possible to just try to get into that 16 year old state and be, ‘You know what? I’m gonna do this! and if it takes me five days it takes me five days!’
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Watch and listen to the full hour long video on the Whale Community’s Youtube Channel to hear more from Alex and the host and interviewer, HeatherHz!
You can see more of Alex’s incredible work on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/alexpardee), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/alexpardeeart/) and his Shop (https://shop.alexpardee.com/)
