Artspo, #1: Jenna Barton, aka Dappermouth

The first entry in what will be a series of entries featuring artists from around the web whose works inspire me in my writing, and whose style I admire greatly as a budding artist myself.

Jenna Barton, also known online as Dappermouth (@dappermouth), has consistently been one of my favourite artists for six years now. I'm a sucker for eerie art, so I guess it only makes sense! I'm not an art student, and I haven't studied art in any way, so I may not have the vocabulary or technical knowledge to critique and analyze artistic pieces, but I'm going to be talking about what I like - what strikes me in Barton's works - and how it inspires my own.

Barton focuses on animals with strange or odd features, usually in eerie locations or situations. Often, they're in places one wouldn't usually find them, or doing things that are a little strange for them to be doing. (For example, there's a lovely illustration of an orca whale floating on a foggy rural road, making its way through some telephone poles.) 

And, very often, they're looking right at you. Take, for example, this illustration: 

For more like this, check out Barton's shop.

This silhouette style with glowing eyes is a hallmark of Barton's art, and the stag/deer a common animal. Other common animals include dogs, lambs, horses, wolves, and jaguars. I particularly adore the texture work in Barton's pieces; notice, for example, the texture of the wall behind the deer, both that part hidden in shadow and the part that is lit up. And - a very cool effect in this piece in particular - check out the way the stag seems to blend into the black doorway behind it, as though it is a shadow born of that darkness...

Notice the use of black-on-red for contrast. If you've seen my graphics for Scareuary posts or my cover for Brittle Teeth (and, if I could show you my design theme for my horror-writing workshop), you'll know that I love this color scheme. Especially for horror. It's raw, bold, and attention-grabbing - the red serves almost like a warning, while the black and shadows hint at a danger lurking.

Personally, it's one of my favourite color schemes, and I like to study the technique used to create a successfully detailed silhouette like in the image above, or the shading technique used in the image below, which darkens the animal to create the contrast (and the foreboding sense of mystery) while still giving us a more accurate idea of what the dog's fur colour looks like. Little details like this really take the images to another level, in my opinion.

For more like this, check out Barton's shop.

There are also a range of neon or vaporwave-themed pieces, which include more pinks and baby blues. If you've been following my blog or my WIPs for any length of time, you'll probably remember that I adore the vaporwave theme, and in fact have a whole sci-fi novel that is set in a vaporwave-themed world (Neon Vape). One of Barton's neon pieces in particular has inspired me:

For more like this, check out Barton's shop.

In Neon Vape, one of the main elements of the story is that the entire virtual universe that Ramona traverses is a vapourwave / retrowave / neon-drenched world.  It's a lot of fun to get inspiration from a range of different sources, but I'm very into this idea of animals existing in an artificial world, so completely out of place, and yet just by their very unpredictable presence they re-create wilderness, leaving you with that feeling of "What's it going to do next?"

Notice again the eyes - the way the animal is staring right at you with these bright, almost completely white eyes, like headlights in the night. As I mentioned before, this is a very common feature in Barton's works. The eye-contact is one of the more unsettling elements in the pieces, not least because of the strange situations and mysterious environments we find the animals in. I could go on and on about the significance of that gaze and the symbolism of it!

Quite often, predatory animals - animals with sharp teeth, shall we say? - are represented with their jaws open, as though ready to bite, giving them a fiercer look. And, in quite a few works, there's something between their teeth. (I have an entire analysis of what teeth can symbolize in this podcast episode, where I discuss the symbol in the context of Brittle Teeth. Transcript here.) In the image of the dog above, it's a snake. Another image of a wolf features a dagger in its mouth. I think this is another representation of imminent danger. It evokes that feeling of realizing you're somewhere you don't want to be - that emotion of wanting to turn and head for the hills... or maybe somewhere less isolated.

For more like this, check out Barton's shop.

As someone who gravitates towards dark, eerie fiction, there is a certain pull towards Barton's works. There's a sense of isolation, of loneliness, and a lurking danger that might just mean the end. And the suspense in these works leaves you wondering - wondering what the subject's next move is. Something about it just fuels my desire to work on stories like Apartment. If you've read Apartment, you'll know that the overwhelming isolation, and the feeling of being trapped with something dangerous in a vast wilderness, with no way out, and the suspense that's built from that, is a vibe that I just really enjoy. Barton's works elicit that emotion for me. 

And, not only is Barton a gifted artist whose works inspire me with my writing, the poetry that accompanies some pieces is also particularly poignant, with just a couple of lines being enough to send my mind into Brainstorming Mode. 

It's important to note how evocative a piece of art can be - how much can be gleaned from one small scene, even with only a few elements. How many stories can be developed, evolving from one small idea elicited by one fascinating image. Barton's work is a source of non-stop inspiration. Some specific pieces lend themselves better to the kind of writing inspiration that really fuels my creativity, like Omens, or Shape on the Stairs. 

As I've mentioned already, Barton's art focuses on animals - they are the recurring characters in her eerie, human-free world. It's fascinating; there is an obvious implication that there are humans in her world - the animals are sometimes seen in front of houses, near telephone poles and roads, inside buildings, and so on - but there's a sense of that human presence having evacuated, leaving the wilderness to take over. Something about rural living might be lend itself to a fitting analysis here.

However, as a writer - and as an artist - it's very rare for me to include animals in my stories. It's intriguing, because while I get a great deal of inspiration from Barton's works, it's more so the vibes that these works put out that inspire my writing, rather than the actual subjects - the animals - themselves.

As an artist, I admire Barton's techniques and themes - the color schemes which work together so well, the consistency in style even through the different series of artworks, and the clear evolution of Barton's skills, as evidenced by comparing early works to more recent ones. These, I think, all artists - especially artists who are just starting to get a handle on their own style and who aren't all that consistent yet, like myself - would find admirable.  

Moreover, Barton does a lot of experimentation with different color schemes, locations, and sub-themes. For example, when I first began to follow Dappermouth, I was intrigued by the Lord Among Wolves set of portraits (see an example below). 

 

For more like this, check out Barton's shop.

Later on, I began to see more varied works on my dashboard: Shadowy animalistic figures in foreboding landscapes. These same silhouetted animals with glowing eyes interacting on some level with homes, buildings, and other common items in our daily lives. And again, these shadowy beasts settled under a hollow neon glow too weak to illuminate them, or giant neon signs that seem more like omens to whoever drives past them. There's such a wide range of different themes - but all the while, animals take center-stage, and particularly in a dark, dangerous, shadowy form.

On another level, Barton said in an interview that one of the most difficult parts of being an artist was "the gulf between what I see in my head and the feeling I want to evoke, and what’s there on the page." This resonated with me a lot - it's something I've felt both as a writer and certainly as an artist, especially as I am so early in my artistic development. I have many ideas in my mind that seem amazing, but there's a disconnect between what my mind wants and what it can get my hands to create. This happens even with my writing - a scene can sound amazing in my head, but once it comes down to getting it on paper, it starts to look a bit odd, perhaps a bit stupid, and ultimately disappointing. I know I'm not alone in this, but there's a reassurance in learning that someone as talented and skilled as Barton also feels this way.

Not only do I find here a source of inspiration for my writer's brain, but also a fountain of creativity and dedication to a craft that truly motivates me to continuously improve and create pieces of art that evoke the kinds of emotions that I would like for them to.

While I currently can't order any of Barton's pieces for myself, since my country isn't on the list of countries it ships to, I'm very excited and looking forward to see how Barton's work evolves and develops in the future, and what different sub-themes will be explored. I haven't been disappointed at all so far!

(If you enjoyed this post, the next Artspo post will hopefully be up by January 29, so keep an eye out for that one!)