“Ford,” Reverse Painting on Glass by Pete Connolly
The Loneliness of the Junked Car
I’ve been following Birds and Arrows for about two years now, ever since my family and I moved to Chapel Hill. They are a local band that seamlessly blends folk music and rock to create a unique sound with beautiful and haunting vocals that makes me wish I could sing. I’m not a music critic, so when I found out that their drummer Pete Connolly was also a visual artist, I knew I wanted to interview him for my blog. And then I saw his paintings, and I was blown away!
So I find myself, once again, winding through the countryside on the way to his home on the outskirts of Orange Country. I know I’m way out beyond the edges of civilization when I pass a political sign done entirely in camouflage that reads, “Rod Chaney: A Chaney You Can Hunt With.” A dappled horse watches me dispassionately as I drive down the Connolly’s driveway and park in front of a sweet little log cabin nestled in the trees. A sleek gray cat promptly jumps onto the hood of my Jeep and eyes me through the windshield.
Pete meets me at the door, wearing slouchy jeans, a Tshirt that states “People Fest 2000,” and a hesitant smile that says he isn’t sure what he’s gotten himself into. He ushers me into a living room dominated by a giant drum set that he’s embellished with a painted image of Old Yeller attacking a bear. In a quiet voice that can barely be heard over the banging of the washing machine that has shimmied off balance, Pete begins to talk about his biography as an artist.
When Pete was hired for his first paying art job, he asked his dad if he should take some college classes on illustration. He mimics his father’s clipped British accent: “You don’t bloody well need to do that. Just go to the library and get a book on colored pencils.” Pete jokes that his art education consisted of less classical training and more Dewey Decimal System.
The Connolly Tarot Deck illustrated by Pete Connolly
Pete’s artistic evolution took the same unconventional path as his art education. His wife Andrea proudly shows me his first official commission – the “Connolly” deck of tarot cards Pete illustrated with his mother Eileen, a well-known author, educator and international parapsychologist. Seventy-eight vivid, yet delicately shaded, colored pencil drawings make up one of the industry’s most popular tarot decks. The images Pete created have a medieval feeling, though many of the male figures appear in robes that are almost Biblical. Each card looks like an individual stained glass panel. It took Pete two years to complete all of the drawings for the deck.
Feng Shui Tarot Deck illustrated by Pete Connolly
The “Feng Shui” deck followed ten years later – intricate watercolor images with pen and ink detailing. The mythical beasts and oriental figures on the cards in the Feng Shui deck are brightly colored and beautifully rendered. Each character’s kimono has a different pattern or design. Of the details on the garments, Pete says, “I had to be sort of a clothing designer.” Andrea wants to get one of the images from the deck tattooed on her arm, but she can’t decide which one she likes best.
“I was living in Santa Barbara at the time, and I came across this idea that I thought was completely unique, not realizing that the technique had been done forever. I did reverse painting on glass, and it’s a technique where it’s the opposite of traditional painting in that you have to start with the highlights on the back of the glass and build out to the background. So you start with the foreground, go to middle ground, and then background.”
The technique may not be as unique as he wanted it to be, but Pete’s artworks are strictly his own. A collage built around a photograph of a stack of junked cars (Pete snuck into a scrap yard in Pulaski, Virginia to take the picture). An almost photorealistic painting of a dilapidated Ford. A haunting, not-quite-abstract image of two silhouetted figures in front of a snowbound car. Pete chronicles the mundane, the sad, the broken. He places these objects against a dramatic backdrop (an eerie night sky or a desolate field) and turns them into something that’s quite beautiful. The emphasis is on the picture as an object, rather than as a glimpse of something in the artist’s emotional world.
“I don’t honestly know what it represents, but it keeps coming back, this whole taking junk and focusing on it, isolating it in a field. I’m not sure what it means.”
“It’s kind of dreamlike; it’s things unnaturally lit by the night sky, as if it has some sort of strange, other worldly light source. And that’s kinda cool.”
As his wife says:
“It’s really beautiful, but it has an edge to it. It has a disturbed vibe to it – but not in a bad way. Sometimes it’s humorous; sometimes it’s just a disturbing visual. There’s something about it that makes you feel a little strange, but in a good way… You start wanting to know the story behind them.”
“Snowblind,” Reverse Painting on Glass by Pete Connolly
Pete has taken a couple of years off from his art to focus on his music with Birds and Arrows, but it has never been far from his thoughts. All of the cover art on the Birds and Arrows albums is based off of paintings done by Pete. He illustrates a yearly calendar that contains the same offbeat humor as the old single-panel Far Side comics. He haunts thrift stores and second hand shops, collecting old photographs, antique keys, quirky little items that might someday make their way into one of his collages. Pete recently found pages of a boy’s homework from 1966 that contain an essay on racial tension and the KKK. He has a jar full of over 600 bread tags that he’s amassed over the past six years. He jokes that they would make a really cool suit of chain mail.
Music and visual art are both integral parts of what makes Pete Connolly tick. When I asked him which he would choose if he had to decide between music and painting, he laughed and said, “I think I’d choose suicide. I couldn’t. I don’t think I could make that choice. I think I’d be miserable without the other.”
“If you listen to the songs I write, my lyrics tend to be very visual. Music inspires me to think lyrically and write words that are beautiful and paint beautiful scenes verbally. So it’s kind of a similar process to create something visual that, hopefully, is beautiful or bizarre. I think it’s kind of the same stuff.”
Luckily for the rest of us, Pete Connolly doesn’t have to make that choice. His musical career is on the upswing. Upon its release, Birds and Arrows’ first album “Starmaker” was picked by the Independent Weekly as the “Album of the Month,” and the band is scheduled to release their third album soon. As for his visual art, Pete is working on a new series for Pop Up art show in Norfolk, Virginia at The Montecello Arcade in February, 2013. His goal is to have thirty paintings ready to display by the beginning of the new year.
Your one and only chance to see Birds and Arrows locally this fall will be on Saturday, October 27 at The Carrack Modern Art in Durham. The band will be debuting songs from their upcoming record Coyotes. Tickets are $7 at the door. Beer and wine will be provided.
designing the triangle 
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