Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen uses his paintings to prove that creativity is interchangeable.
Rick Allen, drummer for Def Leppard, has always been an artistic spirit, and not only in the area of music. Allen was given a camera at a young age, and from his photography he realized painting was another passion of his, “It kind of became my friend… One thing led to another and the photography led me in to painting. It brought me back to the early days of being in school.” On August 31, in Prussia, Pennsylvania, Allen’s fine art exhibit, Rick Allen: Angels and Icons, was on display. “ ‘In essence, what you do is capture huge chunks of a song,’ Mr. Allen says. ‘I’d be sitting there playing ‘Hysteria,’ or any other song for that matter. The idea is to capture that with the light sticks in a dark room and it having a unique sort of footprint as that relates to the song that you’re playing. A lot of times the imagery would really capture the emotion and the essence of the song. It was a long process of picking the pieces that conjured up the right sort of emotion. But most of the time, it was pretty obvious.’”