In His Own Words: James Dodd

Attire Club is all about connecting fashion and style to your life in all ways possible. Beauty can be found in many places and in many forms. The things you use as your inspiration can vary from a photograph to a painting or even a piece of technology. This is why we asked a series of creative people, bloggers and business people from the creative field to write an article about their vision, activity and inspiration.

James Dodd is an artist who plays with color and shape, leaving his inspiration to run wild. He is a good example of what you too can do with your clothes: free the shapes and colors you wish to use and take your creativity and style to a whole different level and you will see that sometimes the most creative things you’ll do, will come from an unexpected place.

We wish to thank James for taking the time to share his reflexive thoughts about himself and for accepting to be part of the Attire Club world! Here is his essay:

My name is James Dodd and I am artist who plays around with all sorts of things but seems to always return to painting of some kind. I always enjoyed drawing as a kid and was lucky enough to be brought up in a family that encouraged me to pursue the things that I am passionate about. I went to art school and now art is how I fit into the world.

Mostly I am interested in public spaces and the kinds of creative things that people do in in public. Sometimes I think about this as being the kind of performance-like endeavors that we pursue, sometimes I think about things like graffiti in its creative forms. I like things that aren’t normal and that test boundaries in various ways. This doesn’t have to be overt or in your face, it can often be very simple everyday ways of being rebellious. I also like adventure, and spend a lot of time thinking about how art and adventure might cross over.

At the moment I am thinking about fences a lot. Borders and boundaries play important roles for people and I like the way that images of fences can become metaphors for this. I am making paintings of holes in chain link fences and of plants that climb over fences or push their way around things. I like the ways in which plants break the rules. The fence paintings might become as much about patterns and painting in its simplest form as well as exploring social and political ideas.

One of the primary things that I would like to encourage people to think about when they see things that I make is that they should feel like they can question the status quo themselves. Everyone has a little bit of rebel in them and sometimes we spend too much time repressing it. I would like people to feel like they might be inspired to break the rules, even it quiet ways. In fact, I would say that I am thinking a lot, lately, about soft or poetic ways of breaking rules.

The business part of creativity is sometimes hard to balance. I am someone who enjoys being organized so I don’t always find it a drag to do behind the scenes stuff. Certainly as creative types it is the creative parts that we enjoy doing the most but paperwork and organization form an unavoidable part of being a successful artist today.

For those people who are pondering a creative career I would encourage you to jump right in. I think it is more difficult if you are more tentative. If I was to put on my swami guru hat at this point I would say something like – as soon as you let the universe know that you are committed to being creative it will start to work out how to support you to do that.

“Deviation”. Breaking away from the rules is a recurrent theme in James Dodd’s work. In fashion, breaking the rules can sometimes lead to new, great innovations.