During a recent chat at his Providence loft, Brian Chippendale spoke about his art, Fort Thunder, drumming, adrenaline, and getting lost in fantasy worlds.
• “I had a computer phase in eighth- and ninth-grade where I was playing long, drawn-out fantasy games. I loved those things. You can get so absorbed in them. I like it when people build this whole world and then you can go in there and visit. I just think it’s awesome to see humans make fantasy worlds. Part of it’s just this sort of depression of how unfantastical the real world seems at times, and how hard the real world is.”
• “I have a fascination with all this crap, all this garbage that’s generated in the world and how everyone is always arguing who is more morally straight than the other person, but on a fundamental level the States, all sorts of places, it’s just a trash culture. We just produce so much shit and so much toxicity. We have no right to say that we don’t deserve some kind of horrible fate.”
• Fort Thunder “would have hit a wall one way or another, I think. And I don’t think I could live in a huge warehouse with like 15 dudes and 10 cats and one cat litterbox. So I’m kind of happy it ended when it did or how it did. But I’m not happy that Providence is a more cramped, expensive place where people can’t get studios that they want.”
• “Since that time I’ve had a hard time investing in a space as the end-all product of all my art-making. Fort Thunder was the big project. It was just like one big painting in my mind that was being worked on.”
• “Providence is actually still pretty awesome. It’s kind of more behind closed doors.”
• “Sometimes I’ll be working and I’ll get stuck so I’ll just sit down at the drum set and I’ll just play something that’s as stupid as I can. And then I’ll just think, I’ll think about the story I’m working on in a comic, or the way to finish an image, or just what the next idea is. Because it just gets adrenaline flowing and when the adrenaline’s flowing your mind just gets to a clearer state.”
• “I’m just trying to make all-encompassing experiences. I think it’s just trying to make intense moments.”
