Chris Stovall was born into a musical family. His father was a jazz musician and his mother, a vocalist, also liked to draw. With this background, Chris, a visual artist, illustrator, and muralist, is both inspired and motivated by music. “I’m a musically based creator,” Chris told us regarding his creative process. “I enter into a soundscape of familiar and yet emotionally charged sounds.” It’s these sounds and emotions that carry him through to a completed project, though it’s the process, the journey of creation that thrills him, whether it’s an abstract piece, a portrait, a mural, a landscape, or even poetry, much more than the finished piece itself. Once finished, however, Chris’s goal is to connect with his audience, to find a place of belonging and to share it.
Growing up biracial in the Pacific Northwest, Chris often felt like an outsider. It’s a feeling he goes back to as he creates. “I am drawn to figuring out the context of belonging in different environments,” he said. Having struggled to feel included in his community as a child, he uses that sense of being an outsider as inspiration for his work, asking his audience to guess at his intent, like an inside joke he is challenging the viewer to “get.”
As a child, Chris liked to draw. Inspired by the illustrations of Maurice Sendak and Mercer Meyer, he would trace these illustrations as a method of studying them, learning how to draw such fantastical images for himself. Other times, he would color in the line drawings that accompanied the poems of Shel Silverstein, spoiling his books and raising the ire of his parents. In middle school, his cartoon drawings of vegetables won him some local fame when one of his teachers submitted them to be used as an advertisement for a neighborhood grocery store. The images remained even when Chris was in his 20s.
Chris likes to challenge himself in his work. He strives for patience and, as such, plans to begin working in oils in addition to acrylics and watercolors. “Oils force the hand towards patience.” And yet he works in other mediums besides, often starting upon an idea before he has decided quite how to carry it out. Sometimes his pieces begin with a game of word association, where a single word inspires a sketch that he creates quite rapidly. Once the piece begins to take shape, only then does he determine whether it will be a pen and ink illustration or a painting or even a poem—a “word landscape” as he calls it.
Chris would like to see more shared spaces for artists. “This community is vibrant but not fully utilized,” he said to us. “I would like to create outlets for others.” In his work as an athletic coach, he has seen the need for places where people, young and old, can gather to express themselves in a safe and receptive environment. He would also like to see art projects that are carried out by the city’s youth. His wish is to see some sort of all-inclusive, immersive art experience, where people can try their hands at different mediums, including music, digital art, performance and visual art, and galleries to show and display what people create there, a way for more accomplished artists to inspire creative expression in the young.
Though Chris is relatively new to Danville, he feels at home here. “The community is already imprinted onto my heart,” he told us, “and the longer I’m here, encountering its story, the deeper that story will affect me.”
