Daryl Thetford grew up in Bradford, Tennessee. His mother was a beautician and his father was a forklift operator who worked in a warehouse. His parents encouraged him to pursue what they called “practical” avenues of work. They also recognized his artistic talent and enrolled him in oil painting lessons at age nine, and he loved it. Although he obtained a degree in counseling from Murray State University, and worked as a vocational program director for fifteen years, his creative juices never dried up. When he left mental health in 2001 to return to art, his first love, he discovered that the psychology of emotion and behavior–everything he studied and had been practicing for years–flowed neatly into his artistic process. He plunged himself into artwork with all his energy. This resulted is a huge body of photo collage work informed by the richness of the psyche.
Thetford’s work has been described as contemporary, pop, modern, and graphic, although what name to give the process has been a larger source of debate. Some have called it digital mixed media, digital art, or photo collage. Thetford begins the process by selecting a single, original photographic image then he does digital layering and combines dozens of additional original photographs. The process takes an average of 40 hours to complete. His resulting images range from culturally familiar individual pieces to more esoteric series that he bases on the human sense of isolation in the noise of the modern world or on man’s inner struggle with modern society.
