Ok, so we’ve been admiring Chad Sims’ artwork for a while now, and we finally tracked him down for an interview.

Chad Sims is an incredibly talented illustrator, painter, muralist, and writer living in Fayetteville. You can check out some of his artwork here or here. We are not art critics, but we think his pictures are pretty incredible.

Fayetteville Flyer: What are you listening to lately?

Chad Sims: Lately I’m listening to a lot of music my friend Andrew D’Arezzo and his wife Hannah Vogan made—they’ve enlisted me to do the art for a record they’re hoping to put out, and I’m sort of absorbing that. I’ve just got it playing on a continuous loop, I’ve got like a copy in every music source, so when I get in my car, there it is, when I’m at the computer, in the kitchen, etc. Before they came along, I was listening to Cat Power, M. Ward, Okkervil River, some more recent Bob Dylan stuff.

FF: Awesome. We remember Hannah from Everyone Asked About You. Can you describe your process when you create? I know this can mean a lot of things, so for example, is it an all at once thing? Do you work on your pieces for long periods of time? Do you drink wine? Do you listen to Snoop Dog? That kind of thing.

Chad Sims: Well, I make great use of Google Image Search. I don’t have easy access to, say, baby peacocks, so if somebody needs that, I have to get a picture somewhere, then sketch it over and over until I “know” it, then I can make it my own. If that makes sense. You could just draw an exact picture of the picture, but that’s cheating. So I try to filter it through my own mind, for better or worse. I know, it sounds totally pretentious. But I figure they came to me because they wanted me, not some drawing of a photograph.

I have a stack of unfinished stuff, which I used to think of as failures or at the very least a fire hazard, but have come to think of as works in progress or thoughtless gifts (my friends seem to like them “as-is,” in sort of the early sketchy stages). But sometimes I come back to those, with good results. Like, they have to cure. Sometimes they have to sit in the attic for a long, long time before I realize it was never a good idea and get rid of it. There’s one in the attic right now that’s a half-naked man with the head of a deer riding a bike, and he’s drinking a glowing 40 oz. It’s things like that, you know—that one’s probably not going to make it. But, I’m getting faster, so these days I can execute stuff pretty soon after I come up with the idea, so it goes out into the world bad or not. I can drink a beer while I paint, and coffee helps facilitate things. Beer is for painting, coffee is for promotion.

FF: Name one artist you admire. (Or more)

Chad Sims: Well, this list is boring. I like Gauguin, Cezanne, Picasso, Grosz. I’m kind of stuck in the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century. That’s not to say nothing valid has come since then, it’s just that I’m still processing and still enamored by those glory days of expressionism and cubism. I guess Darger would be an example of someone a little more recent. I’m not really stodgy or old-fashioned, I look at magazines and on the internet and see, almost daily, current art that I love and admire. I don’t know the names of all those people.

FF: Two parter: What did you want to be when you grew up? What do you want to be now?

Chad Sims: Well, my parents and teachers were pretty encouraging when I was a kid—they saw that I liked to draw and they fostered it. So instead of wanting to be a truck driver or highway patrolman or a stuntdriver or lightsaber technician like all my friends, I wanted to be something called a “commercial artist.” I still don’t know what that means, I think maybe my family suggested it and it sounded good. The goal these days is to become an illustrator, to do editorial work, greeting cards, picture books. That’s probably what a commercial artist is.

FF: What are some of the talented local artists we should check out?

My cousin, Ginny Sims, is great (she’s from Little Rock, now living in Kansas City). She does amazing pottery. Kat Wilson’s photography is fascinating stuff (she’s in Ft. Smith, I believe, and is maybe relocating to Fayetteville soon). I see so much great work around town, and hear a lot of great music, especially at the Art Amiss shows.

FF: We really like your illustrations. Have you done any books?

Chad Sims: I appreciate that compliment, as a fan of the Flyer.

Someone wrote some children’s stories and had me do a handful of illustrations for those, so he could shop it around to publishers (and that was years ago, and I think he’s still shopping). I’d love to do a book of my own, if I could settle on an idea. I have a two-year-old, and he’s given me some inspiration, but I get bored staying on the same theme too long.

We at the Flyer are proud to have such a talented artist living in Fayetteville, and we’re excited to see what’s next for Chad. Thanks for the interview!