Marshall, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, created the piece at Hurley HQ in Costa Mesa using quarts of Behr semi gloss house paint, rollers, heaters (for quicker dry time), and his trusty ruler. Seems like it must have taken hours and hours of meticulous planning—but Dalek’s work, despite its prismatic precision, is never premeditated. “I just show up and start working,” he says, adding that his method generally involves ‘zero planning and zero preparation’. “I find that any time you think about something, it affects the process. I would rather go in and let things unfold naturally.”
While Marshall has created larger murals in the past (he painted a 13x50 foot mural in Chicago last year), this is his largest stand-alone work to date. No mean feat, considering he only had four days to complete the project. The time constraint necessitated “a more minimal composition”, says Marshall.
Nonetheless, it’s a composition dazzling in its carefully-wrought complexity. Much like the LSD-inspired fractal art of the 1990s rave movement, or ultra-detailed Tibetan Buddhist mandalas, there’s a mathematical logic behind Marshall’s psychedelic freak-out. “Yeah, well sometimes psychedelics and mathematics go hand in hand,” laughs Marshall. “With this stuff I get real particular about measurements and balance—and at the same time I don’t really think about it. I am never really making any conscious decisions when I’m working—I almost block out the bigger picture.” Which means that when he finishes a painting and steps back to look at it, it’s like he’s looking at it for the first time. “I feel like I am discovering the work as much as anyone else,” he says.
The work is entirely abstract and devoid of Space Monkeys (the odd, robot-like creatures that dominated his art until very recently). The first of his ‘Space Monkey’ characters emerged in 1995, the same year he graduated with a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the years, that Space Monkey character fueled DALEK’s success in the art and toy worlds. But in the last year, Marshall decided it was time to give his Space Monkeys a well-earned vacation, because ‘everything had become focused on the character’. “When you see something figurative like that, there are certain expectations, like ‘What is it doing and what is it up to?’ It became too loaded.”
Removing Space Monkeys from his work, even if it’s just for now, has allowed Marshall to focus on the abstract landscapes his Monkeys inhabited, strange dimensions of pure shape, color and light. “These days I am really trying to learn about color balance, compositional structure, depth and those sorts of things,” he says. “Now my challenge is to really take something that is 2D and completely flat, and give it as much depth and power as possible. Pretty much what I've been focused on is still learning how to paint. I feel like it's an ongoing process.” — Caroline Ryder/Against The Grain
Stop by 225 Forest in Laguna Beach to check his art or go to: www.dalekart.com
