An Evening With The Dollies

On this episode of the Evil Prints Podcast Darcy and Huck talk about the creation of Huck's latest project: a chiaroscuro block print series featuring Dolly Parton. Discover how Huck's love for music and an impromptu suggestion from a fine art print publisher led to this intricate and heartfelt tribute to the legendary artist. From initial sketch to final print, hear about the inspirations, challenges, and artistic decisions that brought this unique piece to life. Plus, get a sneak peek into Huck's future 'Three Divas' series!

Transcript

Huck 0:55

hi Huck. Hey. What's

Darcy 0:56

up? Welcome back. Today I wanna talk to you about Dolly Parton.

Huck 1:03

Okay. I'm

Darcy 1:04

ready. Not just as a human.

Huck 1:06

Love her. We about that

Darcy 1:07

too. We love her. But specifically

Huck 1:10

how and why we got to this. Is that what you wanna know? How and why we got to this project?

Darcy 1:14

Yeah. So what we wanna talk about today for the listeners is a project that we just finished pulling a chiaroscuro block, two colors of Dolly,

Huck 1:23

a black and white edition

Darcy 1:24

as well. Yes. And actually we printed four different colors of the chiaroscuro block as well as the black and white edition. So tell us how this project came to be and why. Dolly.

Huck 1:35

Okay. A little far background. Everybody knows that, knows anything about me, knows that I'm a mongoloid music fan, audiophile collected music since I was in high school. I still have my records from high school and thousands more. I, I'm into vintage Hi-Fi. That's my hobby. Um, so I have a really wide appreciation for a lot of different tastes. I mean, in the same night sitting down, I can listen to a, a Howlin Wolf record, then a Dolly Parton record, then. Black Sabbath record,

Darcy 2:25

that's about how playlist in the shop go as well. Yeah, yeah. You know, everything from like, Dua Lipa,

Huck 2:31

Dua Lipa,

Darcy 2:32

black Sabbath, anything.

Huck 2:34

It's, and then like surf music. I, I, all of it, steely Dan, you know, and it, the night with Steely Dan. Obsessed with Steely Dan right now. But, so with Dolly, I think that it's not a far reach. I think for me to use, eventually get to the point where I used as a subject of one of my prints and actual music artists, but never, I would've never have done this if it hadn't been, I won't say forced upon me, but tabled for me. And the way that this came about was I've been working. Unofficially for a long time with a publisher in St. A print publisher, fine art print publisher in St. Louis called La Coco, fine Art publisher, and founded by Robert La Coco, I think in the mid to late seventies. And this guy, amazing guy named Mark Niesman, who's the director of the place, has worked there for 30 years. And basically they're known for predominantly all the Alex Katz prints that you see out there in the world and print week and all that stuff. They're the people behind that. They just happened to be in St. Louis, and I've known those guys there since I was in graduate school. Basically, mark, I met Mark in graduate school and. Mark has been buying my work and helping fund some of my projects on and off for years, and he's a completist. He's very excited about my work has been for a long time. So I went in for a normal day to hang out with Mark and basically harangue him for money for this or that, or he owes me money for that or what are you working on? All that kind of stuff. And um, Robert. The big boss man, he had never really spoken to me about working with them officially on a project. He never, it, we had never really discussed it. Um, and while Mark and I were in a meeting, this has never happened before. Mark and I were in a meeting yelling about God knows what. Mm-hmm. Stressing about, God knows what. Robert walks in from his office and sits down by me in front of Mark's desk. And Mark had this look, he's like, what's going on? What's Robert doing? And Robert's like, Tom, when are we gonna do a print yet? And I was like, what? What do you mean? He's like, Dolly Parton. And I'm like, yeah. Dolly Parton. Why don't you do something about Dolly Parton? And I was like, and literally right there when he said that, I came up with the idea, like right there. I knew exactly what I was gonna do.

Darcy 5:45

At first he was talking about a portrait, right? We,

Huck 5:47

we had been talking, I, mark and I were talking about portraits and Robert heard

Darcy 5:52

us. Oh, okay.

Huck 5:53

Talking from the other room is what re I think happened. And the, the topic with me and Mark, what we were discussing is like, we were just talking about portraiture and what we like, what we don't like, um, who we like. Mm-hmm. Um, I don't do portraits. I just don't. Mm-hmm. But I love, you know, Rembrandt's portraits. I love John. Senior Sergeant's portraits I like, and even Andy Warhol's portraits. Mm-hmm. Which I kind of, which I think was kind of where we had landed in the conversation.'cause of the, the Warhol, you know, prince Oh, right. And a portraiture of the celebrity, you know, Uhhuh portraiture, you see. Right. Whereas, you know, when you walk through, um, you know, the pr, the Prodo or the Louvre or the Met or any of these places, you, there's just a lot of unknown portraits of who you don't know who these

Darcy 6:52

people

Huck 6:52

are. Right. Some of'em you do, but not really. Most You don't. So celebrity portraiture,

Darcy 7:00

you're about celebrity artist portraiture. What you're talking about portraiture by artists who are at a celebrity level, or you're talking about both portraits of celebrities? Both.

Huck 7:10

Okay. Both. Um, the only way that you can really pull off celebrity portraits if you're a celebrity artist, I think. Right. Maybe not. But, um, so the Warhol discussion was what we were getting into and, and the dynamics of that. And then it was like, I don't do portraits because, and so Robert walked in and he, he was, he was, he just brought up, he's like, Dolly Parton. And, and what makes sense about it is. I love Dolly Parton, but there's a hillbilly element to Dolly.

Darcy 7:57

That is a good

Huck 7:58

point. And she also is an anti hill bill.

Darcy 8:08

I really never put that together. But that is a very good,

Huck 8:10

uh, parallel for you because she transcends so many things. She transcends her genre. And so I was thinking about this in talking with Mark and now Robert, who's stormed into the office. And if I'm gonna do a portrait, the print that we have done, that's how I would be doing a portrait. I wouldn't do a, oh, she's standing there. Posing now, I'll do an inset portrait with, uh, an absurd narrative that's metaphoric and allegorical and all of that. And so the, the idea I had right away sitting there in the discussion where Dolly was going to be an angel because she is an angel.

Darcy 8:59

She is an angel.

Huck 9:00

Floating above her audience, which in that audience, there's some MAGA types, um, and some crazies. I think there's a lady holding a baby up. And not that that's crazy, but like

Darcy 9:15

she's in the, she's in the,

Huck 9:16

uh, they're at a

Darcy 9:17

show. She's in a concert. She's her band holding a baby overhead.

Huck 9:21

Her band is called The Dolly. She's an angel flying away with a guitar and. That was the basic idea. And then I also had right away the idea to do an inset portrait. Like so a two le two tier narrative. Right? And so the agreement was, okay, we're doing a project with La Coco, an official LA Coco publication, my first one with them. And so I went home that night. I was thinking about it on the drive home. And I sketched out some stuff and then I was sitting in the living room watching as I usually do at night. You know, after late, after I spent about two or three hours in my basement listening to music, um, I was watching TV and a friend of mine who had bought a church in St. Louis and turned it into a skate park. Oh, that's awesome. Kind of a well known place. He one day just showed up at Evil Prince years ago with one of the, um, what are they called? Niches.

Darcy 10:37

Oh. Of, from a

Huck 10:38

church. From a church that was there in the church that he bought. This is, these are from the, like early 19 hundreds. The, the, a plaster niche of one of the stations of the cross. This one is Veronica wiping the face of Jesus. And he brought it to me. He gave it to me, and it's heavy, it's big. And I brought it home when I'm out here and it's been sitting in our living room for years, and I'm sitting there and I look over at it and I thought, you know, that's cool. You know, the, the motif that they're using there with the columns? Mm-hmm. The dork columns or Ionic, or, I think they're dork in this one, but I made'em Corinthian. Uh, there's the three orders of. Of objection, Roman architecture, three orders, Doric, ionic, and Corinthian. Uh, I, I decided to use that motif to frame the dolly print. So I basically, I mean, I think I made it almost the same size. The print is almost the same size of the actual niche, and so that is what. Really propelled. Now I'm hammering home the idea and I'm sketching this out and I'm figuring it out. And then this is all within a matter of 24 hours, I had it all. Wow. Sussed out from meeting at La Coco to final sketch. It was all in 24 hours. Oh my God. And then at the top, at the top of there, I thought, well, you know, she does duets. You know, she, she did great duets. The first most famous duet is Islands in the Stream with Kenny Rogers. Mm-hmm. And Dolly got her career start because of Porter Wagner, who was a really famous country, grand Ole Opry star singer. They did a lot of do, I think they did a couple duet albums, so I thought, I'm gonna put, and they're both dead Porter's. Dead Kenny's. Dead now. And so I put them as little angels up at the top little guardian, angels floating at the top with little clues as to who they are. Um, porter's in a rockabilly suit. Kenny is in his standard like gambler outfit with dice. Oh yeah. Holding dice, right? He's a gambler. And some cards, I think Porter's got a guitar. So the duets thing. Was a side thing and I had that all worked out. And then a few days go by and I gotta start this thing. And of course with me, I didn't, I kind of didn't want the dolly pardon print, which is called an evening with the dollies. The dollies being

Darcy 13:31

her

Huck 13:31

band. Her band. Um, I kind of, I always have to turn it into a bigger project. So I got the idea to do, not really a triptych, but a set of three and this, it's gonna be called The Three Divas. I love that. And the other two, I just picked my favorite women in user

Darcy 13:57

ever. Um, so who's it gonna

Huck 14:00

be? The second one is gonna be Amy Winehouse, and the third one's gonna be Tina

Darcy 14:06

Turner. Awesome.

Huck 14:07

So I'm gonna call it three. Divas. And the thing is, they all did duets, so they'll all have the, and in Tina's, her duets are Ike, which is gonna be rough, and Brian Adams.

Darcy 14:22

Oh wow.

Huck 14:23

You don't even know, do you? Mm-hmm. You don't have any

Darcy 14:25

idea. I know who he is. I know who she is, obviously.

Huck 14:27

But Brian, you know Brian Adams is the summer of fucking 69. Yeah. Which I hear once a week. Really? Yeah. I have for gear since it came out in 1980, fucking five. I've heard that song once a week and it's everywhere. If you listen to the radio, it's gonna be played at least one time. If you're in your car, if you go into Walgreens, they're gonna play it in Walgreens. If you're in an elevator, there's a music version of it. It's everywhere.

Darcy 14:57

That's funny,

Huck 14:58

but he. I think it was like in 86, 87 did a fantastic duet called Its Only Love with Tina Turner. It's Brian Adams and Tina Turner. It's one of the greatest duets ever. It's a rock duet, which you don't really hear a lot of like a rock song duet. Mm-hmm. So they, they worked themselves out. I don't have sketches for the other two. I don't have necessary themes yet mm-hmm. Of those, but I know that's what they're gonna be. And I'm gonna start Amy in February of 26 and she won't be done until October of 2026. And so this is a couple years out. Yeah. Of what? I'm gonna be working on these for Coco. So there's that, that's how Dolly was born. The i the project.

Darcy 15:44

Um, like with the dollies,

Huck 15:46

um, when it comes to portraits. I'm not that kind of artist, so I didn't do your standard. Okay. Bust or seated. Seated bus post. This is my way of doing a portrait and it's the be all, end all of portrait for me. I know I'm not gonna, I can't foresee myself doing standard portraiture. Yeah, there always has to be multiple narratives going on and lots of action and some crazy shit. You know, print references. Um, and these are like, there's a little bit of a reference to like, um, borders in prints, like the, like the um, uh, the triumphant arch, which is a monument on paper. This is kind of like a devotional thing on paper, which I've done obviously before, right? With the. The columns and the arch and all that. Yeah. So it's like a, an inset image in a themed frame of some sort. There's a religious thing to it still because she's devotional. People are very devoted to her. Mm-hmm. And she's a very, uh, transcendent figure. She's beyond the music and she's worthy

Darcy 17:10

Yes.

Huck 17:11

She's very worthy of, of the treatment.

Darcy 17:14

Mm-hmm.

Huck 17:15

By me. And this isn't unofficial. There's no collaboration with her, her people, or any of that, right? This is just a, we're doing this. It's a tribute. Tribute. I did get some bullshit. What online for it? A little bit. It's not out yet. I put like, um, I put, uh, some little. Like snippets of like details of what I'm working

Darcy 17:45

on. Mm-hmm.

Huck 17:46

I think that there was a, a music oh one put on there. Like we put islands in the stream. Royalty. It's not a royalty FaceTime? No, no, no, no. It wasn't any of that. It was just like put that up there. It had islands in the stream. Was the track playing while I showed a snippet of the drawing? For it. And somebody went, and I usually turn off the comments, but for some reason I left it on this time and somebody got on there was like, Hey man, where are the guns and the dicks and shit. Oh my God. And like, like, this is not boiling. This, this is like soft.

Darcy 18:23

That's so funny though. And I,

Huck 18:25

I, I don't remember what I said, but like, I did respond, like, don't worry.

Darcy 18:30

They're still

Huck 18:30

there. There's other projects going on where you're gonna get your fill of violence. You know, I've got other things going on, but this is a soft print.

Darcy 18:41

Which is funny though because it's not like you aim, I don't think to have like violent work, but you make work about what's happening in the world. You know what, Dolly is just a good, nice thing in the world. She wants to, yeah. Megan hates her. She wants to let people learn how to read. Yeah. And you know, give them books and Yeah. She doesn't, she doesn't all that. It's a nicer,

Huck 19:02

you know, it's a nicer print of mine. It's a fun,

Darcy 19:05

it happens. I like it. It's kind of happy. But it still has, I mean, I think it still has the grit to it. It looks like I did. You're talking about angels with Kenny Rogers, but they have like skeleton faces, right? They're not like looking like in their prime when they were alive. No, they're in their prime. It's still very much

Huck 19:23

hug. A little secondary thing, if you guys have not seen it out there, you listeners, you need to go on YouTube and type in Miley Cyrus and Jimmy Fallon Islands in the street. Oh, it is unbelievable. I watched that when I'm, because when I do projects, I'm always researching, you know, I'm looking, gathering info.

Darcy 19:47

Mm-hmm.

Huck 19:48

And I looked at Dolly a lot. I figured out what makes Dolly Dolly visually. Mm-hmm. I figured it out. Her secrets, I know what they are. Remind me to Okay. But, but the Jimmy Fallon, Miley Cyrus duet, they're doing islands in the stream, and what they did was they made it look like the 1980s TV show. That was like, I, they were just, I think in like Kenny and Dolly had been invited to come on the like fucking some daytime show or

Darcy 20:23

something. Oh,

Huck 20:23

yeah. To sing their latest hit. That's a great duet. It's, it's iconic. It's perfect. It's perfect. Written by the Bee Gees. It's a Be Gees song. I did not know that. Yeah. And she, what happens is it's on The Tonight Show, and when he walks out, whoever did

Darcy 20:52

his Jimmy

Huck 20:52

Fallon. Yeah, Jimmy Fallon walks out, whoever did his makeup. We're gonna put a link to this and we will. It's good. It is unbelievable. It's like, oh my God. How is that? How did they do that with his hair? It's exactly like, it looks like Kenny Roger's hair, and he's great and he's singing his parts. He's dressed just like Kenny was in the original video, and Miley comes out. Look, it's her

Darcy 21:19

godmother. It is.

Huck 21:21

Yeah. She comes out. Perfect. Perfect. When Jimmy walked out, people were laughing, right? Like, ha ha, my god, this is funny and shit. But like when he started singing and then she started singing, people stopped laughing because it was so good, because it's like, Hey, they're being very sincere here. This is a tribute. Mm-hmm. And it's fantastic. Yeah. It like gives me shivers, like what? It really means a lot, you know? Yeah. I love seeing, so that was part, I saw that during my research and it got me thinking about Kenny Rogers' hair. Okay. They don't think about these things, but you do. He had feathered hair. He did dude, feathered hair was so soft looking wispy and soft. And so the, the Dolly Secrets, obviously, she has so many different eras. The, when, when I research a project, I dive in full. I got it. And, and that's why I've always said my projects are learning things. Like if I'm doing something about World War ii, I'm gonna, and tanks. I'm gonna learn everything about the tanks and how they look and I research it. You know, I dive in. For about a month before I started, I, I researched Dolly Parton. Her looks were a major part, so I had to decide what era I was going to depict or combination thereof. So, um, there are a few things that make Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton, um, look wise, and it's not her boobs. Everybody when I was growing

Darcy 23:14

up because she's tiny and has giant,

Huck 23:16

giant red, everybody growing up and it's still the joke about Dolly Parton, is that her, her, she has big breasts. Gigantic? I don't think so. I think it's because her waist, I dont know what size waist she has proportionally. I think they just look really big because she's so

Darcy 23:35

small. She's tiny.

Huck 23:36

She's a little bitty

Darcy 23:37

thing.

Huck 23:37

Yeah. But number one, her hair. Whether it's a wig or not, who cares? Her hair is bang on all the time,

Darcy 23:50

okay? Every style, every dew is, there's nothing outta place. Yeah.

Huck 23:54

Second is her tiny, petite ness. Third with a fourth. That's in the ballpark of it. The third thing that makes Dolly Parton. And this might be the number one that nobody gets and nobody pays attention to her dimples. Oh, she has very pronounced dimples. And right near one of those dimples, she has a very pronounced beauty Mark Uhhuh. And of course I fucked it up in the print. I didn't think about the reversal. So you put other, I put it on the wrong

Darcy 24:31

fucking side. Oh my God,

Huck 24:32

that's so funny. But everything else was worked out. Like I had one day in there. The reversal part factored into this. I didn't correct it in the beauty mark, but I did correct it. I had a major problem because I drew it all out in pencil, and what I, what I do is like I get the rough down and I don't do transfers or anything. It's all freehand on there because I like that kind of control. I like to manipulate things until the last moment that I'm going in with the pen. I'm sitting in the studio, I'm looking at it, I'm drawing it all out, and she's flying over the crowd and she's got a guitar. And I realize that with the reversal, she would've ended up being a left-handed guitarist. Oh. And with the way the positioning was, if I changed it right there and only changed the guitar, it wouldn't work because that meant that the, the, the guitar neck would go out beyond. The column. Oh yeah. Or her feet would have to go out, so I had to totally scrap it and repent. Re redraw

Darcy 25:35

it.

Huck 25:36

Oh shit. Backwards to double. Backwards to go the way I originally intended it all to accommodate, because you're

Darcy 25:43

gonna

Huck 25:43

get that one fucking person. Dude, she's not a left-hand guitarist.

Darcy 25:48

So you did go back and you I went back and

Huck 25:50

I reversed, I moved her to the other

Darcy 25:52

side.

Huck 25:53

Okay. So I could do a full reversal within a reversal. It's fucked up. It's, it's complicated. Mm-hmm. But I had to redraw it backwards twice, if that makes sense. I had to draw it backwards twice. There are little things like that. Mm-hmm. That matter. Especially if you're doing. Celebrities because people are gonna pay attention to little details of it, you know? And I chose, ultimately I chose her hairdo, two hairdos. I had, so the inset portrait at the top of the arch, I chose the 1970s, like the one that is on that hairdo, that's on people's t-shirts where she's, yes, she's gorgeous.

Darcy 26:37

Yeah.

Huck 26:38

Her big hair. The big hair, the. Angel portrait part hair is her ninth, early eighties. Mm-hmm. Um, best little whorehouse in Texas hairdo.

Darcy 26:56

It's like swept up or off the side kind

Huck 26:58

of. It's, she's got some curls that come down and it's up in the

Darcy 27:01

back.

Huck 27:02

Yeah. That, that one worked. Okay. So, and you gotta make her cute. She's cute.

Darcy 27:09

She is. At every stage she just is.

Huck 27:11

There's something really cute.

Darcy 27:13

It's like in her eyes and her cheeks.

Huck 27:16

It's her

Darcy 27:16

dimples. And the dimples.

Huck 27:17

Yeah, it's her dimples. Okay. So there, that's how we arrived at

Darcy 27:21

Dolly. What else do you want? Is how we arrived at Dolly. So you did, we ended up pulling four chiaroscuro colors.

Huck 27:30

Different

Darcy 27:30

ones. Different colors,

Huck 27:32

yes.

Darcy 27:32

Yeah. And then the black

Huck 27:33

and white, we did a black and white run that were hand rubbed because of all the problems that we had that we've already discussed.

Darcy 27:40

Yes. We'll, we'll, uh.

Huck 27:41

We've already discussed

Darcy 27:43

That'll be in the second episode.

Huck 27:44

We're going back to go forward. Yes.

Darcy 27:46

Come back to

Huck 27:46

go forward. So, yeah. And that's how it, how it happened. That's the, the origin story of the Dolly Parton project.

Darcy 27:53

And so we can be expecting Amy Winehouse second, or Tina Turner.

Huck 27:57

She'll be, Amy Winehouse will be the second

Darcy 27:59

one. Will you do the same colors for the chiaroscuro prints, or are you gonna switch up the colors yet? Based on the

Huck 28:03

artist yet? No, no. Yet there will be a black and white edition for all of'em. For all of them. Yeah.

Darcy 28:09

Alright, well thank you. Alright. We, um, had a hell of a time printing the Dolly block, so tune in to our next episode. That was the Dolly Disaster. That

Huck 28:18

whole episode, a whole

Darcy 28:19

episode that all the, the printing snafus that came with it. But the addition is done. You've signed the edition at La Coco

Huck 28:27

signed them three days

Darcy 28:28

ago. Alright.

Huck 28:29

Yay.

Darcy 28:30

Hey, Dolly's done and uh, we will link. Special thanks

Huck 28:35

to Mark Niesman and Robert Lacoco for funding this bullshit.

Darcy 28:38

Thank you. Thanks. Alright, we'll talk to everybody later. Bye. Say bye bye.