You fail so many times and everybody I've talked to, other artists about this, it's like,
what do you do when you have a bad day?
Everybody has them, everybody has bad days and one day it'll be like
I could paint anything, I could paint anything and i feel it 100 percent.
And then the next day it's like, what happened?
And that's exactly how i feel sometimes, I can't explain it, but here's my formula.
Good music.
I always always say a quick prayer.
Coffee is always is always goo.
I have good lighting, I have my right brushes, and I have enough space.
I dig in with good references, and that's how
I have to have a perfect scenario every single time, or I try to.
Doesn't always happen, but I always try to.
It's like channeling lightning, you know, you have all these emotions.
Channeling a storm is probably a better way to say it.
I'm here in Indianapolis, Indiana where you're going to get to meet Jay Parnell,
an artist, a portrait artist who has an incredible background as a photographer.
I'm here at is actually home and studio.
I can't wait for you to meet him, follow me!
Hi I'm Jay Parnell, I am a painter, narrative painter here in Indianapolis, Indiana.
My father is an artist, he was a creative director, he was a painter.
My brother he's also an artist, so he's a painter.
My mother as a poet.
It's just marinating in creativity from the very beginning,
and so i couldn't help but be an artist.
Ii was big into Star Wars back in the early days, like Star Wars the first Star Wars the original.
I was into Conan and comic books, and so that's,
that's really where it all started. And I saw that in all the comic books
somebody was drawing and so I was like I'm gonna do some of that kind of stuff.
My my major was telecommunications.
I also took photography classes,
and so I didn't take any painting I'm completely self-taught as a painter.
Being in a dark room and seeing a photograph come out of no place,
it's magic, and so I fell in love with that magic.
So, my first job out of college was at this place called
Ball Corporation in Muncie, and they do the ball jars.
I worked there as a photographer later I said,
hey guys I can I'm an illustrator too, can I do some illustration?
And it just exploded from there.
I loved illustration, kept doing photography, and so I was kind of doing both of them.
Another point I was like, okay, I'm going to really focus on being an artist.
And so I started participating in shows and just kept going from there.
I was big into portraiture and so I looked at Irving Penn is
absolutely brilliant, was absolutely brilliant.
His black and white portraits are, you know, second to none.
Annie Leibovitz is another brilliant portrait photographer.
Her stuff that she did with Rolling Stone up until what she's doing with Vanity Fair.
Now those those kind of people are the people that influenced me,
and I also was influenced by some of the darker photo artists like Joel Peter Witkin.
But, his stuff was just composed in such a way that it was,
it was kind of a mix of photography and art.
And he had a very definite eye on the history of painting not just photography but painting.
And so it takes it to another level when you look at art that way,
or you look at photography that way you see it as art instead of just a photograph.
I feel like I have a calling which is my art, but then I also have a job because,
you know, for most of my career at UPS I've had kids and homeschool kids.
So, that means my wife was not working I was the only one working.
So I had to make the bacon.
I never wanted to be the, you know, that poetic starving artist.
I mean, that didn't sound romantic to me at all that sounded like divorce.
Jay, tell me about what it's like, I mean, you've got this interesting perspective of
you've got your office and you've got your studio and it's out of your house.
So, what's it like?
It's probably the the best of all worlds because my wife is at home most of the
time and is my favorite person in the world to spend time with, so that makes it easy.
And then my favorite thing to do in the world is to paint, so that's easy.
And then I have my job where I
make a lot of phone calls from home, home office and all that so, it's all super easy.
And it doesn't take away from my creativity having to be there so much because
it just gives me more opportunities.
I heard this story about Prince my favorite musician,
and I heard that he had ways to record in every room in his house including the bathroom.
Including the bathroom?
Yes, yes!
Art does play a vital role and it's always going to be with us whether it's,
you know, the the paintings in Lascaux, or graffiti, or somebody painting a king.
Art's going to always be with us and it's going to tell us
what happened either by what it says or what it doesn't say.
There's this this energy underneath the image and I love that secret meaning
and I try to capture that with with all my work.
There's a story for me and when you look at it you may not
see exactly what I did but you'll see something.
And you're like there's something more to this, and I've had lots of people just say
okay, yeah, I see what he's doing here
and they'll explain it to me and it's like I like his story better than mine!
Where we are right now is not happening in a vacuum, it's not
out of no place it's been happening for a long time.
It's just this is a culmination of events, this is a climax of the movie.
Wrapping my head around that idea has been has been interesting.
I think this is this is a very interesting place to be
in history right now and to be alive right now, is I think, this is worth celebrating.
To be a part of this to say I did something, you know, whether it's as an artist, as
a politician, or you know, whatever.
I want to get to the point where I have several, like, iconic pieces at the end of my career.
I can look back and I could say I'm very proud of tha, I think I did something good there.
I'm not, you know, a Hemingway or anything like that.
I'm not going to write it all out, but I can paint it, and if I can paint it
I can paint my ,you know, my best novel yet.
And that's really what I'm trying to do is I want to lead up to that
and leave some very iconic pieces along the way.