By Chase Martin
When I meet J.T. Dockery, he’s sitting in a coffee shop, wearing thick-framed glasses and a battered fedora, scribbling in a notebook as a barista fires up the blender. “I used to keep my own studio,” he chuckles over the noise, “but there’ve been some domestic troubles on the home front, lately.” So, since around last October, he’s been filling his sketchbooks in coffee shops–usually Third Street Stuff. “Luckily, most of my drawings are 11 x 14 or smaller, so they’re pretty portable,” Dockery explains, gesturing towards a crammed shoulder bag slumped against his chair. Unlike artists working in more restrictive mediums, he can take his studio just about anywhere.
Dockery creates surreal, intricately detailed works of ink on paper, often combined with text rendered in jittery lettering. Many of these illustrations are designed to work together like a graphic novel, but the stories he’s telling are rarely straightforward. “I work in narrative, but for me, the writer part of my brain and the visual part of my brain are always working together, even if it’s not a sequential story,” he says. A plot about a tough gumshoe detective may veer suddenly into a series of panels about oozing space creatures invading from above. Though the story lines in his art are often as labyrinthine as his crosshatching, they are consistently compelling.
Influenced by the hard-boiled characters of film noir, underground comics of the 1960s and ‘70s, and gritty photographers such as Weegee, one page of Dockery’s work may startle you with its stark beauty–another may make you wonder what prescriptions he’s taking. “Absurdity and surrealism just kind of come out of me,” he remarks. Dockery’s instantly recognizable style makes use of bizarre, erotic, sometimes repulsive imagery paired with text that can in turn be funny, philosophical, or frightening.
Many images that start out in his sketchbooks find their way into his finished work. “I definitely refer back to them. They’re a way to keep drawing: ideas come out that take different forms later on.” With his Rapidograph pen, he points to a finished drawing of a stylized heart holding a gun. “This came from a sketchbook I filled about 3 years ago. I opened it one day, and there was this subversively cute cartoon heart there, holding a gun, waiting for me.” His current notebook contains abstract compositions, an eerie portrait of a man’s face, and a detailed replica of a Master of Kung Fu comic book cover he loved in his childhood.
Dockery grew up in Jackson County, Kentucky, where he developed a love for comic books and began drawing at an early age. When he was around 20, he stopped drawing temporarily when he discovered he was developing arthritis. “The pain really bothered me at that age,” he recalls, “but when I started drawing again it really helped me get through a tough time.” He eventually attended UK and Morehead University, and at first wanted to pursue a career in academia before finally deciding to devote himself to artistic efforts, intrigued by the union of narrative and visual imagery. “At some point, hopefully I can make some money off my art, but that’s not the main concern right now.”
Currently, Dockery makes ends meet by working at the downtown restaurant Gumbo Ya Ya’s, which leaves him with time and energy to pursue his passion. And he has been busy. In 2008, he finished an oversized, fifty-page graphic novel, In Tongues Illustrated, a tour-de-force of hallucinatory illustration and interwoven narrative. He is also collaborating on a project titled Creekwater with a friend from his band, The Smacks!, that’s being serialized in the newspaper North of Center. “It’s very old school to have a story that’s developing from week to week, literally like chapters in a book. It’s been challenging, but fun.” He is also working on some drawings for a book that will be printed by Larkspur Press, and is slowly chipping away at The Organ Grinder, a new graphic novel of his own.
This article was written for the Institute 193 blog, http://www.institute193.org/blog/. See more of JT Dockery’s work at his blog Covertly and By Snatches, http://covertlyandbysnatches.blogspot.com/. Check out some of his serialized Creekwater comics, which appeared on the NoC comic page, in the archives section of our website, noclexington.com.
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