Dan, 44″ x 44″, oil on linen
This painting is the one that I am most excited about at the moment. I just have been agonizing, absolutely pained, to figure out how I can marry my approach to painting to the world in which I live. I’d put out an ad on Craigslist for models, and it wasn’t looking promising. I’d been scanning through hundreds of idiotic, painted glamour shots of club hopping guidos and what not. I can’t tell you how many hundreds of pursed lips I saw. I was actually getting disillusioned about Long Island- I wondered what I was doing in such a sea of stupidity. And then Dan appears. Actually, he simply sends an email. Dan is a fascinating guy, full of all of these ironies. Covered in tattoos, built like a tank, yet he could compete with any smalltalking Englishman by carrying on a lilting, warm conversation for hours on end. He’s full of stories, of life experiences- businesses that bellied up, bridges that he waited under with his motorcycle during a storm, buddies that are in jail, a close friend that is off at Bible camp. All his stories are told with a lyrical grace, always with a laugh, always without a trace of bitterness . He appreciates his experiences by incorporating it into his music, and then moves on. Nothing could depict his self aware ironies better than the baby blue background. A black background would be painfully obvious for any heavy metal rocker, but that’s not him.
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