John David Deardourff

John David Deardourff is an very talented artist residing in Washington, DC. In 2012 he received a BFA with an emphasis in printmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. JD’s incredible abstract work lends aesthetic elements from comics, resulting in a unique raw style in an exciting color palette. In his own words, Deardourff finds inspiration in “the vocabulary of comic book art: exaggeration, movement, energy, the interplay of sequential imagery, black contour line, and, most importantly, artificial color.” Over the last few years JD’s work has been receiving growing attention, both from art lovers and critics. Deardourff has exhibited his artwork in Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and DC. In addition, he has designed graphics for Burton Snowboards and album art for RAMP Records. In February 2015, he was awarded a fellowship at Yaddo, an artist colony in upstate New York. A solo show of collages and screen prints made during the fellowship is currently on view at Hillyer Art Space in Washington, DC, which is running for two more days.

In an interview with WERTN, John on how he works:

I begin all of my pieces by making a collage of shapes and panels and pages that I have cut out of comic books. When I am making the collage there’s not that much on my mind, I am just kind of making intuitive, aesthetic decisions about color and composition, and then reacting to those decisions by cutting out or adding new elements.

And his creative process:

Once I have a collage that I am interested in, I use that as a sketch for a screen print. I put the collage on a light table and trace the screen print color separations by hand. Usually I’ll start with like 7 colors but often I end up going back and adding more. I’m always struggling with when enough is enough. Anyways, then I’ll scan the separations into photoshop and mess with the cropping and sizing and then print them out as stencils to burn onto my screens.

We look forward what the future will hold for this very talented artist.

Catch his show at the Hillyer Art Space on 9 Hillyer Ct in Washington DC before it closes the day after tomorrow. For more information see here.

Make sure to follow John on Instagram.

For more work by and information on JD see here