An Interview with Erol Pierce
4/28/21
by Clio Thayer
Tell me about your senior project.
My senior project is the essence of my storytelling and my way of describing how my family interacts with each other. I come from a very large family where I’m just surrounded by people all the time. I like to represent my family as different characters or different objects and I just like to make them float through space. In my earlier drawings, it led to a lot of landscapes and playing around with space. My current work, which I’ve been developing, I have canonized specific people in my life with specific memories of things that I’ve cherished, and I’ve turned them into pieces that are sort of comical, whimsical, and it kind of explained specific moments in my life. Flat out, I do drawings of a house and different structures and I have them overlap and I mess around with symmetry and space a lot. It focuses on objects and space and how things pivot, shift around each other, and how they interact within their own sense of space.
And this is all through printmaking, right?
Yes, I study letterpress, relief printing, and screen printing as part of my three main sources of print. I’m fairly well versed in all of them.
What made you chose those mediums for this project?
There are a lot of different aspects to each style of printmaking that make it so unique. Screen printing, as a tool, is very accessible. You can play around a lot with color saturation. I use rubylith screen printing, so it’s designing your layers by hand, instead of doing it on Photoshop or Illustrator, designing them from a computer, I design all mine by hand because it feels less artificial and more natural. It’s stylized screen printing where you can burn in the screens up manually instead of having to print everything out and use a whole bunch of paper. It saves on some costs in the long run.
When it comes to relief printing, it’s just that I like to print in big, black, and white and I just like to use big paper and do really obscured compositions. I’m able to just do fun stuff to show off drawing capability and what can be shown.
Letterpress is incorporating type and incorporating words into art. It’s super difficult for non-designers but it’s just fun too. You get to hand lay the type, so it’s designing it all by hand again. A lot of printmaking is process-based.
Do you usually work with themes based off of family in your art?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s all very family-oriented. The work that I’m doing right now is taking specific quotes from who I consider my chosen family and how we interact with each other. It just adding another aspect of what family could mean to me.
What type of art did you start with and how did it lead you into Fine Art?
Both my parents were artists and I grew up in a very artistic home. So, I started from a very early age, which I feel like is super common. I’ve been in art school since I was in sixth grade, because my parents were cool and they let me go to an art middle school and an art high school. I wanted to do art since I was a kid, and my parents have been very supportive of my journey and what I’m doing and how I’ve evolved artistically. Having that support is awesome because I’ve been able to just focus on making stuff. When I started college, it was a lot of figure work and painting. It was mainly assignment driven, but once I finally started taking printmaking classes and learning different styles of print, I just fell in love with it. You can do so much with it.
What are some of your artistic inspirations?
Everyday life. Part of it is just walking around the city and looking at buildings. I like to just get into my car, drive around, and look at architecture. I like the look of fancy buildings, and study window structures.
Artistically, I’m really influenced by Cinta Vidal, Shepard Fairey, and love Sherrie York. I’m influenced by a lot of printmakers. I love Bill Cass’ work, and I’m trying to stem off and take as many different tools as possible.
Probably my biggest inspirations are my parents. My Dad’s almost fifty and he’s still painting. We send each other pictures of whatever we are working on whenever, which is really comforting.
Do you work a lot in your dorm or in the studio? What do those spaces look like?
Both! In the French Building, I have an entire wall in the screen-printing room is mine. I take up a lot of space. I use the Letterpress Room, Screen-Printing Room, and the Relief Room, which are all of the major spaces in the French Building, but that’s to physically print stuff. In my dorm studio, because I have a complete setup there as well, it’s more like the designing phase. Designing my screen prints, working on my drawings, coming up with sketches and thumbnails, and writing notes to myself or working on my thesis. It’s like what can’t be done in the studio, gets done in there, and vice versa.
How far do you think you’ve come since you were a freshman?
I don’t know how to explain that in words. I can respect the art that I was doing back then; I can look at myself and say, “Okay, so I knew what I was doing. It was a start.” But you have to start somewhere in order to grow, and I look at the growth after four years and I’m just amazed. It’s very heart-warming to see that growth.
Where do you want to go after you graduate, professionally?
Professionally, I want to do commercial screen-printing, like making merchandise that way. I want to work at a print shop and become a master printer, which is a long process, but I want to stay in commercial screen-printing, as a job.
How do you see your work engaging the world, whether it’s this specific project or your work in general?
I’d like to think that the symbolism that I’m going for and the icons that I chose in my work are universal. It’s a house, it’s an object, anyone can associate something or someone to it and I do that intentionally. I want to be able to connect more and more people, so they can see the vibrancy in colors, how space can be manipulated, and how you can make interesting compositions. I always go for that jaw-drop moment where people go like, “that’s a print.” If you can fool someone with a screen-print, and they think that it’s digitally printed, then you did a good job. That’s what my dad always tells me. I just want to be able to connect to more people, so that they can understand it or be lost in the mystery of it. You have to play every field.
How has community here impacted you or your work, whether that’s faculty, staff, or your peers?
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to thank James Chase and Bill Cass enough for all they’ve shown me and the support that they give me. I do really crazy stuff in the printmaking department, and they are always like, “Do you want some paper?” They are just as excited to see the crazy stuff as I am and that support of when you actually impress your teachers, that’s a very heartwarming moment. Now, it’s just that I want to make them proud and I don’t think I’ll be able to thank them enough for what they’ve taught me and what I’ve learned all this time. That is truly great.
What advice do you have for underclassmen and incoming freshmen?
Trust your art. If you don’t feel good about it, finish it anyways, take notes on what you did wrong, and then fix it in the next piece. If you can understand the mistakes you’ve made in the first one and then fix those as you keep moving, you’ll progress a lot faster.
