| When I was a little kid, I used to love to graffiti moustaches and eye patches and assorted types of teeth onto the photos in magazines. Transforming the nice people into something to laugh at, something that looked creepy or disgusting was fun. There was a strange power in over-accessorizing the beautiful or the normal. Hey, I’m still at it! Here’s a look at a recurring character, who is surely the descendant of the magazine freaks, “Mr. Everything,” who I’ve been painting in one form or another for a long time. |  |
Decadent Freak or Reliant American – Daniel Davidson
When I was a little kid, I used to love to graffiti moustaches and eye patches and assorted types of teeth onto the photos in magazines. Transforming the nice people into something to laugh at, something that looked creepy or disgusting was fun. There was a strange power in over-accessorizing the beautiful or the normal. Hey, I’m still at it!
Here’s a look at a recurring character, who is surely the descendant of the magazine freaks, “Mr. Everything,” who I’ve been painting in one form or another for a long time.
He is the happy loser—unaware of himself really, overloaded with attachments, which seem to represent life’s daily excitements and problems. A phone call, a song on the I-pod, sunglasses, hats, pills, band-aids, earphones—these all serve as a way to “fortify” against whatever might happen. Jennifer Coates termed them “worst-case scenario self-portraits.” How true! Chugging through life ready for anything, a mockery of the independent self-reliant American, happily unaware of their predicament.
Mr. Everything Pieta (Just In Case) is a painting of a fictional statue, which becomes his own paranoid, self-canceling tribute. With all the attachments and superstitions that he can bear he becomes his own warning buoy.
The original sketch was pretty complete, I liked the idea that he was made out of all the same black and white material rather than a mix of painting styles and colored parts.
The style I rendered it in is self-consciously tight and illustrated to give it a mock solidity like carved stone. I changed the face from the original to a happier, more complex face whose deflationary smile reflects the over-medicated celebrity of the self. Maybe the snowman wakes up one day to realize he has melted and that all there ever was were the scarf, top hat and carrot, but Mr. Everything’s not letting go that easily.
