Back To The Drawing Board: The Living End's Chris Cheney Rediscovers Art

As far back as I can remember I loved to draw. I loved cartoons as a kid so perhaps that’s where my love for visual art began?

My dad was great at drawing and used to do these amazing little sketches in notebooks and scraps of paper. I guess I just copied him and so I used to spend hours drawing pictures. I had sketch books that I took everywhere I went and I filled the pages with drawings of everything from motorcycles to cartoons to portraits and yes lots of guitars!

Before I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be some sort of an artist or a graphic designer. But as the band took off, I spent more time with a guitar in my hand than the pencil. Apart from a few Living End logos and t shirt designs, the last decade or so I hadn’t done too much art at all. I’d never really done too much painting until 2021 as we went into lockdown and I picked up a paint brush and started throwing ideas at the canvas.

The first few paintings I did were in a more realism style but I found myself being drawn to more abstract art, so I’ve been doing more of that lately. I don’t really know what I’m doing but that’s the beauty of it! Knowing too much theory in music can be a real handicap if you’re not careful and I feel the same with painting. If you can draw then great but if you can’t it doesn’t matter. I just start somewhere with shapes and bits of paper and then add and subtract as I feel. The complete lack of rules is liberating. I just lose myself in it and work away until I decide it’s done. Not too dissimilar to songwriting - quite often what you leave out is the most important bit.

The Storm Before The Calm cover painting was different to any of my previous paintings and I just thought it would look great as an album cover. Also very different to anything The Living End would use for art. The frantic busy nature of the image seemed to fit with the chaos I was living through when making this record.

By releasing and this solo album and rediscovering my love for visual art I feel I’ve come full circle and I’ve really enjoyed the creative journey that painting has taken me on. Music and art have always gone hand in hand for me so it just made sense to combine both and to use my painting for the cover.