Darrell Chocolate got a mining job when art school was too expensive. Now he does both for a living

Portraiture is hard; ask any working artist. Get one line wrong, misshape an eye, and you've blown the whole thing. But for Yellowknife-based Dené artist Darrell Chocolate, portraiture is a joy.

Growing up in the small Tlicho community of Gameti, the self-taught artist always had a passion for capturing the human face, drawing pictures of his favourite athletes — NBA stars like Allen Iverson. As a teenager, he'd hoped to go to art school in Alberta, but a lack of money and distance meant that wouldn't happen. Instead, he went to work in a nearby mine, keeping art as a hobby.

In 2009, a colleague at the mine noticed Chocolate's drawings and asked for a portrait of his wife. That moment made Chocolate start to take art more seriously. And while he still works in mining, he now has a second career as an artist — and a distinctive style of portraiture that both accurately captures its subjects while showing off his own point of view.

Chocolate will be exhibiting his work as part of Toronto's Outdoor Art Fair. We caught up to him about life as an artist/miner, why he loves painting nature, and how he honed his portraiture skills.

So tell me how your love of basketball helped you hone your art skills.

I used to go buy Slam Magazine, and I'd see all the photographs in the magazine of their dunks. And that kind of intrigued me to do drawings in my sketchbook. So that's how I grew my skill level, too — by drawing these NBA players doing dunks.

That kind of caught the attention of my peers in school. And when they saw my art, they were always amazed, seeing what I could do on the paper.

You have a full-time day job in a mine, and you also have a pretty active art practice. How do you balance all that?

[My schedule is] two weeks on and two weeks off. So the two weeks on, that's all work, and on my two weeks off, I pretty much have all the time I want. So that's how I balance the two. Obviously I spend time with family, but I make time for artwork. Being creative — the process of creating new work, whether it be wildlife or human portraits — it's just a passion of mine.

It was a colleague at the mine who got you to start painting again, right?

I [hadn't been] doing any painting since [I left] high school, when I went to work in the diamond mine. Painting, for me, wasn't that big of a priority. That drive wasn't there for me. Being young and hanging out with your friends is more of a priority in your 20s. In 2009, one of my coworkers knew that I could draw portraits and he asked me to do a portrait of him and his wife, because it was his anniversary coming up.

Originally I thought I could do it with coloured pencils, but then I knew that it would take me a long time. So then I thought, I knew I could [paint] portraits back in high school, so I picked up some paints and some brushes and started painting. My painting skills started to come back, and I just haven't stopped since then. I have to thank that co-worker for commissioning me.

A lot of professionally trained artists struggle with portraits. What do you think makes you so good at it?

I think I just really see the facial features: the nose, the eyes, the eye, the cheekbones, the jaw line, those sheep ears and all this. I think what really brought my skill level up was drawing these NBA players doing dunks.

You do a lot of nature painting, too. What speaks to you about that?

Wildlife is something that every artist here in the North has for their main subject in their artwork. So naturally, I just kind of picked up on that, too. Some challenges I face are trying to capture the details: the fur and the little strands of their whiskers, the claws and the beak of the owl, the feathers. To me, it's almost like a therapy.

What else inspires you?

One of my paintings comes from the movies. I have one from The Last of the Mohicans — Daniel Day-Lewis and the late Russell Means in the ending scene. When I [watched] that scene, I was like, "I gotta make that into a painting." When I was working on it, that got a lot of take-up on social media. I posted it on my Facebook, a short timelapse of me sketching the subject. That wound up selling to someone in England.

Do you want to make art a full-time living? Is that a goal?

You have to keep in mind, I still have a mortgage. I still have a vehicle payment. I have five kids to provide for and a wife; she's a stay-at-home mom right now. Once my youngest goes to kindergarten, maybe she can go back to work, and if she gets something steady, I can try and be an artist full-time.