Lost in His Work: Cover Artist Arless Day
by Stephen Faure
When the Tigers are playing, a game day at Arless and Patsy Day’s house is as intense and ritualistic an affair as you could witness anywhere. “We have a TV on in the bedroom and a TV on in the den and we go back and forth. If they’re doing well in one room, then we stay there. If they miss a field goal—we’re out,” Arless says.
Although he now calls Florida home, Arless grew up in Baton Rouge. His family roots remain planted in Louisiana, with family members living in the capital city, New Orleans and Braithwaite. His memories of Louisiana also remain strong and deeply influence his work.
Purple and gold runs through his veins; he thinks it’s actually genetic. Son Arlen Winslow (named after artist Winslow Homer) was raised in Florida, but he is as big a fanatic as any in the family. Recently married, his bride watches LSU games with the Days. “That’s been the first test for our daughter-in-law,” Arless notes.
Growing up, Arless loved going out on the water with his family, including his namesake uncle, Arless. Whether crawfishing, crabbing or just dipping a line in the water trying to catch fish, his time spent in boats had a special meaning. “When I was a kid, I thought I’d do that the rest of my life. Then, I moved off and I never get to do that type of thing anymore. At least I get to paint it and use boats [in my work].”
Arless is a collage artist, using found images from different media to assemble a new environment for the viewer. He explains, “I try to create a place in time, just as a director in a movie creates a set.” After assembling pictorial elements, Arless typically will add painted-in details and textures to the piece.
This issue’s cover, titled simply enough, “Yellow Boat,” was inspired in part by his childhood days spent on the water. A picture of a boat caught Arless’ interest, he cut it out and the creative process took over from there. “Most of the time, I find an element I really like and build an environment around it. Like the little mountain scene behind the boat, the sort of imagery that’s placed in there. It doesn’t really exist.”
For “Yellow Boat,” he’s built “an imaginary place that’s kind of on the edge of a bank. The border, like in a lot of my pieces, sort of flows you into the piece. The color that’s around reflects the actual image inside.” It contains some textual elements. In some of his work, type becomes an integral piece. In “Yellow Boat,” his use of type “echoes what happens in the books and magazines that I’m cutting and tearing to do the work.” Overall, Arless says of the cover piece, “I like the design and the perspective, the way the boat points you. You’re very close to the boat and it zooms you back, way back into the mountains.”
Arless credits his family—his father, Benny and brother Ben are artists—with giving him the freedom as a child to do what he did intuitively—create drawings from things he saw in magazines, books and his own imagination rather than drawing in a classroom setting.
He did receive formal training at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla. Starting at age 18, he was the first in his family not to attend LSU. Arless was drafted into the Army after art school, but stayed in the South, serving at Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Benning in Georgia.
After leaving the army, he decided to put his formal training to work as an illustrator in Dallas and then in Charlotte, N.C. There he became friends with artist Joseph Raffael, who inspired him to focus on fine art.
Arless painted watercolors for over seven years. His first collage was the result of some divine intervention. He recalls that day. “It came about on a day when everything went wrong, and I basically cried out to God; nothing was going right. I wanted change; the watercolors didn’t feel like they were growing.” That evening he tore a picture out of a magazine and painted on it. “I knew instantly that this was what I was meant to do.”
He went on to create more collages in the days after that. He showed them to a gallery owner in Charlotte, who was expecting to see watercolors. The owner was impressed, and decided to do an entire show of the collages. “For seven years, I did watercolors, and I never went back,” Arless says.
Although he does create many outdoor scenes—among them boats and depictions of the exteriors of buildings—Arless is best known for the interiors he creates. He calls them “places of character,” like the kind of home where one feels very comfortable. His gift is the ability to create environments that comfort the viewer so much that they become lost in the imagery.
As a viewer, you first get a definite sense of familiarity. A familiarity of materials—images cut from magazines and coffee table books—that keep you looking at the scene. A familiarity of place. Foliage in some rooms clues you into the environment; banana leaves on one side of the room and bamboo in a corner hint that it’s in a warm climate. Maps and posters on the walls tell you more about the setting. You feel comfortable there. The furnishings, the books, the coat hanging on the wall—everything sparks a memory that says you’ve been in a room like this before. Or a false memory—that you’d like to be living in a room like this sometime. Or, even stronger—you’d like to become the kind of person that would have a home with a room just like this.
Arless says, “I’m a big movie fan. I’m big on settings. There’re so many directions the rooms can take as they are evolving. You’re opening up space as you’re creating windows. You’re giving the audience a little glimpse of what’s behind the door. The viewer has the chance to say, ‘Who would live here? Who would collect these things? Why that chair?’ All of these things give the viewer an idea of who lives there, without a person being there.”
Collaging
Arless freely shares a glimpse of his creative process. First, he mines for images—he compares it to an archeological dig—in books that have mostly heavy stock, usually “... forty to fifty-dollar books. Sometimes I get them from used bookstores that have a lot of old books, but I need really good color stock. I use a lot of foreign magazines and a lot of interior magazines. World of Interiors is a magazine I’ve used a lot. It’s a very fine stock, and the quality of the imagery is very good.”
As an example, he details the steps taken in making “Louisiana Retreat.” “I found a book with a wonderful fireplace. Then I proceeded to compile hundreds of images that I felt were compatible with the fireplace and the surroundings and that would work in the interior.
Once things start happening, the journey begins to unfold behind the fireplace. I constructed a wall from maps of New Orleans with the Mississippi River kind of twisting and turning with the wall behind it,” he says, relating how he was able to tie Louisiana into the work.
Added details tell more about the person who “owns” the room. “The fireplace has a nice, large mantle. I was able to place a number of small globes on top of it to suggest a world traveler.” Filling out the room is a leather chair he tore out and placed in it.
Working with found images can give an odd perspective when pieced together, but that’s part of the plan: “Putting in these elements that were taken at different perspectives sort of draws you back into the rooms. The globes make it feel kind of three-dimensional, because you’re layering them into the actual collage.”
As the room takes shape, and he has a good idea how all the images work with each other, he coats the back of the images with wax, and places them on a board. The wax allows Arless the freedom to move elements around until he’s satisfied that they are where they belong.
Painting
After burnishing down the images to set them in place, Arless paints. His painting mindset is much different from his collaging mindset, where he is consumed with finding the right elements to go together in the piece. “The painting process has more of a passionate freedom to it, yet at the same time there is a certain patience and reverence to those elements that you’ve taken all this time to find and place in the work,” Arless observes. “There are painting days and there are collaging days.”
With paint, Arless embellishes the collage, adding details that weren’t there before, or creating a mood in the background. Almost all of the elements of this issue’s cover piece, “Yellow Boat,” have been painted on top; in places, the paint has been scratched back to a prior layer.
Arless paints with Q-tips, brushes and sometimes with a rubber stamp. He uses a screwdriver to scratch back through the paint. “There are a lot of techniques I’ve developed over the years to apply the paint, to make even that a unique statement in the work,” he notes.
At times, when looking at his work, it’s difficult to tell where the collage stops and the painting begins. “Sometimes I can be very meticulous in the painting process, almost make it photographic, and then blend it or change it—a distinction that it isn’t all photography, that there is a layer of paint.”
When trying to describe the process that goes into his painting—getting lost in his work—Arless is reminded of a quote from Vincent Van Gogh. “I’ve used this quote in talks I’ve given, to try to explain how I work: ‘I never had such a chance, nature here being so extraordinarily beautiful...I cannot paint it as beautiful as that, but it absorbs me so much that I let myself go, never thinking of a single rule.’”
On a painting day, Arless finds his collage waiting for him in the studio, and, “I let myself go, just as Van Gogh suggested. My best work is when painting has little to do with time, but more to do with how lost I am in the world I created.”
Once he’s finished painting, a clear coat of acrylic seals the work, which is then ready for framing.
Finding Materials
Always on the lookout for new materials, bookstores are favorite hunting grounds for Arless. But booksellers need not worry; Arless may prospect for images in their shops, but he won’t do any actual mining there—he saves that for home. “I’m not very bashful; I’ll rip the pages out of books. Patsy says I’m not safe to be around. Most of the books in our house, except for books we’re reading and the Bible, are always missing pages. Calendars are not very safe.”
We’ll be sure to send him some extra copies of Inside Northside.
Arless Day’s work will be featured July 5-Aug. 2 at Brunner Gallery, 215 N. Columbia St. in Covington. A special exhibition featuring his work will run from Oct. 4-Nov. 29 at Brunner’s Baton Rouge location in the Shaw Center for the Arts, 100 Lafayette St. Visit brunnergallery.com for more information.
