About the Artist
Self-portrait of artist D.A. Merrick (pastel and charcoal)
About the Artist – Interview with D.A. Merrick
D.A. Merrick is a visual artist and philosopher whose work explores the intersection of aesthetic form and philosophical inquiry. Through both digital and traditional media, Merrick engages with deep questions of meaning, suffering, and reality itself. This conversation, conducted in interview format, offers a rare window into the thinking behind the work. Rather than presenting a synthetic artist bio, this dialogue invites the reader to enter into the artist’s world as it unfolds—question by question, thought by thought.
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Q: What do you want your art to communicate to your audience?
A: As a philosopher, I’m more concerned with the full gambit of thought than with one type, such as emotion. I want them to digest my work and become more evolved. I want to be a part of the audience’s personal evolution. Not that I think I know what that evolution should look like—I don’t. But I see myself as someone who is constantly evolving and, in one aspect of my practice, I want them to take from that personal evolution what they will. I put a lot of effort into myself, measuring myself and trying to be, for lack of a better word, a better person that, at the very least, suffers less, but, ideally, is also happy and leads a pleasurable life. I want to communicate that journey with my audience, allowing them to take what they will from it.
There's a second aspect to my practice. In my personal philosophy, I find that suffering comes, in large part, from not living cogently with reality. People, myself included, often think in such a manner that is in conflict with reality. It’s a strange gift of life, I think. But, really, what I mean is, there is a brick wall in the path of a person, but that person doesn’t believe in the brick wall, or doesn’t care enough about it to consider it an obstacle, so they walk into it and keep walking into it, hurting themselves. Living cogently with reality is seeing the brick wall. It’s about becoming more real, and living as such. It’s something I work to be, and I think that is reflected in my art. I hope that people can, in some process of digestion of my work, also do that.
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Q: How does your personal philosophy show up in your art?
A: I try to be honest about my understanding of reality, and of myself and this process I undergo. There is self-reflection in pieces like Without and Wanting, where I dive deep into my psyche. The title comes from being without much and wanting those things: a romantic relationship, a solid grounding for my understanding of nature, confidence that I will be safe, a sense of calm—so much is contained within the expression of the figure. I am then evaluating myself in a moment and sharing the process of cogency with reality with my audience, whether they realize it or not (and I think we all intuit these things on some level, even when consciously we do not understand them).
Then there are pieces that, regardless of how they began (they often begin differently than they end up), are a philosophical approach. They serve as the premise for a conclusion I have arrived at toward that understanding of reality that I hope leads to a cogent relationship. Hopefully, suffering is reduced and happiness and pleasure can be found.
This is visible in pieces like those of my Devil Series where I explore evil. In the first of that series, Pyrrhic Victory, I imagine a Devil—this ultimate evil—that has won outright. The conclusions I have reached regarding evil are that it is, by its nature, a tendency toward unexistence, by which I mean an undoing of all existence. Not nothingness, per se. Nothing implies that there is something. It goes deeper than that, and is inexplicable by its nature. Pyrrhic Victory serves as the premise for this conclusion.
The other conclusion that I have reached is that evil, where victorious, undoes itself as it too is an existing thing, and something that exists, and that undoes all that exists must undo itself, too. So, it can never win entirely. It is self-defeating.
I hope people reach the same conclusions as me to an extent, but the beauty of this philosophical approach to art—where the art serves as the premise for realizations or conclusions—is that the audience can draw conclusions of their own that no one else has made, myself included. It’s pure magic. It’s using reality as a jumping off place for argument. And it makes reality and this argumentative process that takes place in philosophy so much more compelling.
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Q: What is your creative process like?
A: Difficult. I’m trying to create something aesthetically compelling, but at the same time I’m trying to create something meaningful and uncompromisingly so. I’m also trying to create something greater than I am consciously capable of. I’m trying to create something that I can’t just say with words. So a lot of it is about this meditative back and forth between me and my subconscious.
Sometimes an idea will come spontaneously to me. That would be my subconscious speaking. Then there are other times I will have a conscious idea that I will start with. Other times I have to force myself to draw anything—a cold start where I generate a lot of inadequate ideas until something resonates.
Digital media is a great place for this kind of approach because it’s so easy to edit. I can easily ditch an idea without breaking the bank, and I can also go back and forth with disagreement and counterpoint to my subconscious.
In traditional media, this approach is still possible, but the stakes are a lot higher. Vine charcoal is the best place for me to start, as I can erase very easily and go back and forth. But there’s a point at which I have to commit to an idea and there’s really no turning back. It’s exciting, and also very anxiety-inducing.
I love both digital and traditional methods, but of the two, I’d say digital has more freedom.
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Q: What do you hope people gain from your work?
A: I hope it enriches their lives in some way. It could be that they come to understand reality more, it could not. Ultimately, I want there to be less suffering and more happiness and pleasure in the world. If my art can do that for someone—maybe by giving them something to talk about or through sheer aesthetic pleasure—I’m happy with that.
My aim isn’t to alienate my audience with arduous philosophical homework. My aim is to create something that sinks into their minds and becomes embedded in their life. I want the realizations to be organic, and I hope happiness and pleasure follow at some point, even if not immediately. Sometimes my art is quite dark and challenging, so it might not be readily apparent that that is my hope; but it is. I don’t think that there is a road to happiness that isn’t riddled with darkness and challenges though. Reality is a very dark and challenging thing.
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Q: What do you wish people understood about the role of artists?
A: I wish people understood the role of artists as meaning makers. I’m not a nihilist, per se, but I believe that reality and its constituents have no innate meaning. Instead, those things have innate functions.
Take a sunset, for example. If I ask you, “What does a sunset mean?” you might understandably respond, “It means that it will be night soon.” In English, we use the word “meaning” to stand in for functionality or causation. That’s not what I mean (no pun intended).
In a painting, or a story, or a movie, a TV show, a sunset can become a metaphor for something else. It can foreshadow something to come, or accompany a moment that parallels the sunset’s properties. And then we associate the sunsets we come across in our everyday lives with that meaning, especially the more impactful or common that meaning is. Then the sunset really becomes meaningful beyond its function to indicate night will arrive soon.
To an extent, this happens naturally as humans draw associations between things, but no one else except for the artist actively pursues meaning making as a practice. And I think that is a profound and important thing for humanity and life in general. It may even be an important thing for reality in general as we deign to shape it in the course of our lives.
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