Drawing In Harrow With Chris Dent and Arran Gregory

During my Art and Design Foundation at Chelsea I met a few creative, gripping people and lot of pretentious useless waste. Some guy shaved the right half of his head for a “before and after ” project, a chubby girl spent some time naked in a cage with coloured custard drizzling on her, and a lot of genitals were drawn, sculpted and exhibited with the help of one hand, two hands, the wrong hand, no hands, no eyes… the usual art school stuff.

One of the good ones was Arran Gregory. Arran stood out by producing an accomplished animation for his final show; from what I recall it was stop-motion animation involving a Magritte-style dude jumping from cloud to cloud, and fun geometrical shapes evolving around him. It was quite advanced compared to the rest of us. I decided to catch up with him 3 years later to see where he was at graphically and visit his studio. After completing a degree in graphics at Chelsea he moved out of London and back home in Surrey. I caught up with him and his good friend Chris Dent (who, it turns out, is a pretty talented guy too. See below) at Dent’s studio in Harrow.

Chris Dent is an illustrator who is into cityscapes. Where most young illustrators nowadays seem to have a thing for deers or moustaches, Chris produces highly graphic drawings of city environments. He’s big on New york and draws it damn well. Check out one of his sketchbooks here to see what I’m talking about. While drawing buildings could be restrictive for some people, his creations are accurate but imaginative at the same time. They are not plain location drawings; you just want to sit there all the detail in time and time again. I can picture his Camberwell Illustration comrades shitting themselves when they saw this guy first put pen to paper a couple of years ago. Besides that, he’s a friendly and clever guy with a sense of style, all geared in Supreme. His mate Arran has already done work for Pharell Williams, BBC, Nike town, Slam City Skates and various skateboarding brands. He also takes good looking photos and made a magnificent 2 meter high disco bear sculpture for his final degree show.

I went to have a look around the studio and talk to them about their work.

Chris Dent

Arran Gregory

How did two you met? Are you really good friends?
Arran: We are now. Obviously when we met we weren’t. We have a mutual friend, Max Parsons who I was at uni with and that Chris went to school with. An then one day I was just hanging out with Max and he met up with Chris to talk about a collective that they were starting at the time and I just went along with Max. I had a lot of sketchbooks and that with me and I showed them to Chris on the train.

Chris: I scouted you

A: Yeah, you scouted me. So yeah I just joined the collective and that’s how we all met.

C: It was five years ago. It never really evolved that much. We found it quite difficult to get the work done. The concept was to get a group of creatives toguether to try and see how we could work with each other and push each other. It was also a chance to make friends with people that were doing the same thing. Arran and I did a project together – a shop installation in Carnaby Street at Chateau Roux – we were put in charge of a wall there. We drew a huge city and a wolf illustration .

A: It was a good two, three weeks in the summer, just going down there each day to draw and hang out . We had never worked on this scale before so it was interesting to find out how our work could be used in a more commercial environment on a larger scale. And it did work; it is still there now!

Chris Dent

Drescribe your work.
C: My work is really neat and tidy. Arran covers a lot of different areas I think. Wherever he puts his hands to he seems to do very well. He has done the bear sculpture which is very well done and then his illustraion style is very detailed and kind of mono-toned. and then hes gotta graphic design side as well. It’s hard to explain or describe what exactly Arran does.

A: I’ve my finger in many pies. I think that’s a result of the course I studied, Graphic Design for Communication, which was for more concentrated on concepts over style. So it covered a lot of areas, not just graphic design, or illustration, or photography or animation or film, but like everything. You know if you had a concept, then the concept decided how it would be answered, rather than “i’m an illustrator I have to use a pen to answer this brief “. It’s more the other way around. The course was all about big ideas. But now that I have finished uni it is kind of a though one because big ideas dont really apply to jobs in such a usefull way like, for example, I have done such a big variety of work the client doesn’t really know how to pinpoint what I do. So now I’m looking to find my style.

C: It takes time.

A: Coming back to Chris’s work, Chris has that angle down to a T. He knows exactly what he’s doing and has perfected it.

C: …which is scary.

A: …which is awesome man! Chris does the best drawings you’ll see of cities. Super-intricate and the amount of attention to detail is really amazing. He would draw a whole city and spend weeks on it or many many hours.

Chris Dent

Chris, do you draw from location or do you take pictures?
C: I take pictures to create my work. I try to take my own photographs, obviously the client sometimes gives me their photos. Some images are made up, for example I would research a few locations and create a scene from it.

Do you have any other interests that could take over, or have you ever though of a change in direction?
C: I think Arran more than me. I’ve always had my sight on being an artist. When I was younger I used to play football, could have taken that route, but I decided quite early on that I prefer to take the route of an artist. I’m glad I did.

A: The only other thing I’d like to do if I didn’t do this would be to document animals. Be a filmer or a photographer, to be the guy that sits on a montain for two weeks to wait for a certain owl to come out, and take a photo of that. I’d love to do that. Animals feature predominantly in my work. I love nature and, I guess, I try to represent the beauty of it in my work, in a graphical way. Now I’ve started to do a bit of sculpture as well, like the Mirror Bear.

C: I think mine had kind of the opposite effect, and I kind of knew what I wanted to do and always had this interest in architcture. I love the feeling of being in the city and love that kind of atmosphere and always wanted to portray that in my work. Now I’m starting to think I could go into architecture or go as a visualiser somewhere.

A: Would you say that football has affected your practice as an artist in any way?

C: No. I think to be honest that as an artist you can get quite lonely at times, and sometimes on weekends… For me having football as a break, socially and taking your mind of things is important. It is more of a positive. If I would have had carried on like I was then it would have had an effect on my work.

A: Yeah ‘cos when I am not doing artwork I spend all my time skateboarding, and that is definately separate from what I’m doing but it still really affects what I’m doing in a big way. Also I was thinking about when I used to do taekwondo when I was a kid, at a pretty high level. I started when I was seven and trained till I was sixteen and I got into the England team for that, fought in Argentina and stuff, then I gave up when I was 16. But the discipline of that it kind of shines through when you are doing something like we do. It gives you the perseverance, discipline and dedication.

C: Yeah that’s the same for me. Cos I played at quite a high standard, playing for Tottenham when I was in the youth academy, and just kind of being in a team and being dedicated. It has probably helped my work.

Arran Gregory

What are your working processes? Do you get an idea and just do it, or do you think for ages about it?
C: I normally go staight into it. I dont do a lot of sketching. All of it is mostly drawn staight with pen.

A: Same here. I can’t deal with pencil. And I think that if you are in the right mood and you are focused… Otherwise you got to do the whole thing twice. If you try too hard it shows..

C: There’s that. And also I think that, for me, if I had to do a rough I would lose the character of my work, it would become too precise. I think my work is very playfull if you look closer to it, the lines aren’t perfect, I do like to play with the line differently.

A: I think that there is so much character in the line that everyone draws . Like if I drew a circle and you drew a circle , you know they would all look completly different, they would be our styles and I wouldn’t be able to draw yours. If you try to control it its less honest in a way. Like in handwriting for instance, if you try to forge someone else’s signature it looks crap you know. It’s an honest expression you can’t feign.

C: It’s completly different when I work for clients, obviously they want to see a rough, I have to do a rough. When I worked for wallpaper magazine, worked for them for a year doing very precise architecture drawings, and it had to be pinpoint and had to change my style and get a bit more precise.

Do you live from your work?
C: Yeah. I graduated 3 and a half years ago. Since then, I’ve been working full time as an artist, luckily been busy the whole way through. It’s been pretty good, I’m happy doing what I do.

A: I’ve only been out of Uni for 6 months, so had to move in back with the parents, but I’m supporting myself paying rent to them. As of June I’m gonna have an agent, it’s a new agency starting up called “Daydream Nation”. Hopefully that would help me out finacially, and I’m gonna move back into London into a warehouse with some friends at the start of May. It’s one of my friends who runs Pointer footwear and slam city skates. His fiancee decided that they wanted to start an agency. There’s only a small crew of us at the moment and we are all from a skateboarding background, so it’s this kind of a skate artists collective. I did a lot of work for slam city skates; t-shirts and everything. We’re having an exhibition to kick it off in June and its gonna be at Christies, the art auctioners.


Arran Gregory

Arran, can you explain the Mirror Bear?
A: The mirror bear was my final project at uni and it was kind of a 3D realisation of what was originally a 2D project where I had created a series of party animals in photoshop. I made a panther, a deer, a wolf, a bear and a horse. Then for my final major project I wanted to create it in real life. But it was a massive challenge I didn’t know wether it would work or not . So I slaved away for 10 weeks, handcrafted it out of one block of polystirene which was 8 foot tall. Cut it down using a saw, and I kind of had all my eggs in one basket cos I had never done that before. But obviously it was all or nothing I would fail my degree if I didnt do it so I was super determined to make it work…

There’s two and a half thousand mirror squares covering it and he waits about 120 kgs. He is seven and a half foot tall. I showed him at my degree show and he went down pretty well. From there I got an offer to exhibit him again in covent garden for a show called D.I.Y London scene, which is also skateboard related. Then he went to a gallery in east London called Electric Blue, where he’s been hanging out there for a while: he had two shows there. Last week end I moved him to canary walf, so now he is hanging out in the lobby of a building, it’s his new house.

Did you sell him? How much?

A: No. He is on sale at the moment. people can contact me if they are interested, I got a figure in my head. Where he is now he’s in front of a better audience with a bit more money.

Do you actually want to sell him or would you rather keep him?
A: I really wanna sell him. He’s getting old and I’ve got lot of new ideas I wanna do but I can’t do them because they need a budget. And he’s a lot of stress to move and just to know he’s somewhere is a stress. He’s like having a child.

What artists do you like?
C: Jason Jagel who did a lot of painting for MF Doom. I also like Saul Steinberg.

A: Katsushika Hokusai. I think that’s ‘cos when I was a kid my uncle went to Japan and came back with this little radio for me that had a painting of Mount Fuji on it. That image stuck in my mind. Then I went to the show “36 views of mount Fuji” when it was on in London , then I saw it again when I was in japan, and then when I was in Sydney the show was on again! So I was like, this guy must be my favorite, he’s following me. I also like Cy Twombly.