Mind-Meld with Aaron: Sean Dietrich
Welcome to the third and very special edition of Mind-Meld with Aaron!
Many, like myself, grew up with fairytales and children’s book that encompassed stories as old as time. Some were morality tales, while others just existed for our pure childish enjoyment. As we grew older we realized that some of those stories followed us to adulthood. They changed and morphed, some of them got edgier and others jumped from page onto real life. The great ones, the ones that we welcome, while receiving a fresh coat of paint, never lost what made them a childhood delight in the first place.
Alice in Wonderland is one such story, and today there comes a brand new interpretation straight from the wacky mind of veteran artist: Sean Dietrich! Sean is launching a Kickstarter filled with his beautiful art of Wonderland. He was also gracious enough to answer a few questions about art and this project that he holds so dear!
A: Which art medium do you feel captures your artistic intent the best?
SD: The easy answer is acrylic paint and ink, which I use daily to create the pieces that I do. I’ve been using the paint/ink combo for over 20 years now, and it’s what I’m most comfortable with, making it easier to focus on a theme, message, and concept. As my career presses on, I want to see what my work looks like animated, sculpted, or in a VR environment, so I love to take my art into different realms. Still, as far as what will create the best version of what’s banging around in my head, it’s the painting.
A: How did you get started in art? And was there a moment that made you realize that making art was what you wanted to do for a living?
SD: I started young. My mom worked at K-Mart in the late 70's/early 80’s and would bring me home lots of art supplies, and I just took to it. I told her when I was 4 that I was going to be an artist when I grew up and never looked back. Also, having a great art teacher in 6th grade who entered my art into the first contests I won was a great confidence booster.
Then I started to get into comics in the mid-’90s and really got sucked into wanting to be a comic artist, so I self-published my first book at age 15, set up at my local comic shop on new comic Wednesday, and between that and the high school sold 400 copies of 2 issues. After that, I was off and running and knew I would be an artist, whether in comics or something else.
I learned early about making sure your irons are in different fires in order to make it. I was in comics, then worked for PlayStation on the ‘Twisted Metal’ game, and after my day job I was out live painting at clubs across Southern California. Now I tour the U.S. and Australia, showing my art at major rock festivals, have books published, run a manufacturing side of my studio that creates products with my art, and indulge in many other outlets for my craft.
A: On your website there are some fun merch to go along with your art, what got you into rolling trays, lighters, and the like?
SD: Much of my merch, especially the rolling trays, Zippos, grinders, etc., comes from being in the cannabis/smoke shop industry for the last 11 years. I know that is a considerable leap in another direction from comic books. Still, you’d be surprised (or not) how many industries are desperate for high-quality art for their marketing and merch.
I used to set up an art booth at the CHAMPS Trade Show with my buddy Vincent Gordon. This trade show was for anything you would need to outfit your smoke shop, and we provided options for some insane art for your shop. Soon, though, companies started to court us for product art and shop logo design, or just a cool piece of art to go with what they produced.
About 7 years ago, I was picked up by OCB Rolling Papers, the largest rolling paper company in the world. They had me do some poster work which they then turned into a rolling tray, and through that one tray, unleashed a huge collector market for smoke shop products with fine art on them. There was no real art on rolling trays, etc., just clip art or a company name, so when OCB launched this tray, and I saw how it exploded on the scene, I knew I wanted to start producing my own products.
So fast forward, 6 years of working with OCB, I began to sample my own products and was ready to launch a small line with my artwork. The rest is kind of an ongoing history. I left OCB and started my own company whereby I source all of my own products, quality test them, design them, and have a sales team to distribute and wholesale them. It also allows me to have some really unique, professional, and high-quality products to sell at my festivals each year. It’s led to some really cool licensing agreements with companies such as Zippo, Toker-Poker, and Genius Pipes.
A: One of the things I love is that when I see one of your pieces, I know right away, it’s one of your works. What factors helped you develop your unique and vibrant art style?
SD: I think a few things that contribute to my style and the recognizability of my art are the consistency of how I paint and the attention to stylistic details. We recognize artists’ styles because of the number of times we are exposed to them and the amount of detail that we pick up from the art itself, especially if there are stylistic details that become the ‘Oh, that’s a Sean Dietrich painting because of the textures in the background’ moments. And though other artists maybe use insane line work and splashes and whatnot, I think that the style of character mixed with the linework and textures creates how my style can be recognized.
It’s not just one thing or another for me, it’s a combination of elements, but that’s also my opinion. I’m on the other side of the mirror on this one, so I guess I’d have to poll people to see what the hell makes them recognize my art heh heh. One of the things that influenced my style was bringing in elements from all aspects of what inspired me throughout the years, such as the environments of Bob Ross, the people from a Norman Rockwell painting, trying to paint what an early Ministry or NIN video looked like, and what I picked up from comic artists like Sam Kieth and Todd McFarlane. I took minor elements from each of them and made them my own and then drowned those elements in life experience to make it truly mine.
When I first got into comics, I stopped collecting so that I wouldn’t be influenced by anyone because, at that time, I was using the comics I read for inspiration. I knew that if I were to develop my own flair and style, it would be because of what I did in life, not what I learned in any school or read in a how-to book. That’s very evident because if you looked at my early comic art when I was bumming around the streets of New Orleans in my 20s, it’s really dark and destructive. Nowadays, I lean more towards the dark but comedic coated in vibrant colors.
A: What is it about Wonderland specifically that has stayed with you all this time?
SD: The thing about Wonderland that has stuck with me is its untapped potential. As it first came out even, I think the book was just an excellent springboard for so much more. If you really dive deep into the book, we know very little about the characters Alice meets. They are very brief encounters full of beautiful nonsense.
Still, even interpretations of Alice in film, games, and other media don’t really get into the stories of these characters. This is one of the things I hope to do with the upcoming book Sugar Cube; I want to give these characters personalities and traits that come to define them for a new generation. There have been those who’ve tried, but it seems like there’d be so much more in the 157 years that this book’s been around. For instance, if you read the Wizard of OZ, OZ is explored extensively. There’s an insane amount of territory that is talked about and many, many denizens to meet. Wonderland looks pretty compact in comparison.
A: Do you have a favorite copy of Wonderland that you keep coming back to?
SD: The original, honestly, is my fav edition of the book. I like the version that Ralph Steadman illustrated, and that’s probably my close second. Still, I absolutely love the illustrations in the first edition. I own a 1952 reprint of the original, and it’s one of my prized books. Looks great, reads great, and smells even better!
A: What are your hopes for your version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
SD: My hopes for my version of Alice are that I open a whole slew of new people, young and old, to what Wonderland could be and what the characters could look like if you use all the crayons in the box. I focused mainly on character-driven pieces in the book, giving a more intimate look at who Alice is meeting.
I want parents who pick this up and read it to their children to be amazed at the colors of the art and the detail of what I’ve painted. I went very texture and line work heavy to combat the vast amount of ‘cute minimal’ art that has been flooding the market for years now. I love painting with texture so that people have a more tactile feeling when looking at the painting. They can almost feel the patches on the Hatter’s hat or imagine all of the smoke swirling around on the Caterpillar’s skin. It’s Alice through fresh eyes, and that’s never a bad thing.
A: What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned while creating your take on Wonderland?
SD: What I took away was realizing how much longer it took to complete than I thought because of the prep time. I’m talking about the amount of research I put into making sure my characters looked nothing like Disney’s version or trying to find out how many books out there had super vibrant art and how many had just black and white illustrations. I read a book about Alice’s fashion from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s to see how her dress has evolved. When I make an interpretation of something, I really want to own it, so I usually put in more research time than the time it takes to complete the paintings, but it’s fun for me, and that’s how I use my paintings to continually learn.
For the upcoming Alice continuation book ‘Sugar Cube’ I’m researching everything I can about Reno in the 1950s, Native American cultures in the area, joining a séance and interviewing mediums, and learning about what it takes to run a hotel and casino to make sure there’s an authenticity to the book. I want to know that I’m taking much more away from each project I take on than just a series of paintings or a book. Gotta have some damn good stories to go along with the finished product, too!
A: Is there anything about being an artist that you feel isn’t getting talked about enough? Or is considered underrated?
SD: One underrated thing about being an artist is the value placed on this profession and how much it affects the world around us. For some reason being an artist is seen as a bum’s path, a way that will just kill the spirit with failure and that only a select few will make it. Sure, most artists aren’t going to achieve super success, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t quite a few artists out there making a living off of what they do. Not to sound too egotistical, artists are one of the only honest professions left in this world, and I extend that to mean visual, musical, and performance artists.
This was the earliest form of communication. They were the rock stars of the old world, but rock stars that actually did something to advance civilization. Everything we touch and see today is a result of some form of art, from the fork you eat your eggs with in the morning to the car you drive to the clothes you wear. A reboot of how the arts are looked at is well overdue.
Being an artist is looked at as just a hobby or something to do as a side hustle, and we are told to pursue being a doctor or lawyer because it pays well. I’ll let you know, though, I’ve had plenty of lawyers and doctors in awe of my art, but I’ve never walked into their offices and had my jaw drop at anything other than the bill. Those ‘valued’ professions may bring in a paycheck, but artists wield an insane amount of power in their ability to inspire people or make them cry or smile or rethink their whole position in life. Most other professions are a result of a reaction to something. Art is something that we use to reach out to other flesh and to move civilization forward — to make it more than just ingurgitate, defecate, fornicate and repeat.
A: Do you have any advice you want to give to aspiring artists?
SD: I have an endless amount of advice for other artists, and I’ll probably talk to Red 23 about publishing that book in the future! But in a nutshell, the one thing that I would love to see artists start doing is to know your worth. One of the hardest things about art is placing a price on it. For some artists, it’s the terrifying equivalent of putting a bounty on someone’s head. Still, it’s one of the most essential things about pursuing this as a profession.
Don’t be afraid to ask for what your art is worth. The biggest problem many artists face is that they quit their day job too soon and now rely on whatever they can scrape up, which usually leads to them getting ripped off for their art. Take your time to build your career, even if that means a day job for a decade. This is NOT an easy profession, but it is possible.
One of the milestones of success as an artist is when you can finally say ‘NO’ to a gig or a price. When you start dealing out ‘no’s like beers at a bar, you’re on your way! I’ve walked away from multi-billion dollar companies because they were moving too slow, and I’ve told big companies to piss off when they couldn’t afford what I wanted because I know my worth as an artist. I’ve seen many of my peers’ careers take off before mine, but in the end, I now command much higher prices for my art because I was organized in how I balanced my career financial essentials and knew what I wanted for my work and stuck with it.
Is there wiggle room? Absolutely! Art is a hustle, and you’ll learn to leverage things as well to get you where you want, but overall think about your legacy, think about your family, and what you would wish for your younger self to see if they could look into their future, and price accordingly.
A: Lastly, Tea Time with the Hatter or Games with the Red Queen?
SD: Although I am a croquet beast, I would hang with the Hatter for tea. I may even bring a little something to spike it with just to keep up with the madness. I don’t like royals either. The casual setting of an insane tea party in the woods is more my speed than some yard game of animal abuse with uppity snobs. No, for me, the Hatter would always be my choice for a friend in Wonderland.
All Sean Dietrich artwork and mech can be on his website for purchase at: https://seandietrichart.com/
Alice Adventures in Wonderland by Sean Dietrich Kickstarter link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redtwentythree/2050045616?ref=999609&token=fbd66e11
