Faces Light Up to See Dan Paint

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a billboard with See Dan Paint artwork on it - and you know it's See Dan Paint artwork, because the houses in the art have faces on them.

"Faces in places," says Dan Smith, the Dan of See Dan Paint. "I start with the shapes and go back to do the faces. That's all spontaneous monsterfication. I don't really think about it, I just do it."

The Lancaster, Pennsylvania, native took his first art class while studying at the University of Georgia. After earning a BFA in Painting and Drawing and an MFEd in Art Education, the doodles and faces followed.

"I got my painting degree, and then I got certified to teach," says Dan. "So I was living in an apartment and realized I couldn't paint giant abstract paintings anymore. I had to do something different. So I used the little drawings I'd done in my art history notebooks in the margins, and they were these quick little doodles. And this is what grew out of that."

His emotion, especially his humor, is evident in the characters and stories told in his paintings. It continues into the title of each work, such as "The Spontaneously Monsterfied Illustrative Account of the Lincoln," "Mr. Gallawackus, You Have Nothing to Fear Except Fear Itself and the Skeletoxer," and "Moby Richard," a painting of a whale with many expressive features. For one piece, he used the language of Esperanto for the text in the painting, including translating his signature "See Dan Paint" to "Vidi Dan Farbo."

In October of this year, he unveiled the results of his "painting a week" project, 52 in 52, which was on display at Flicker bar. The collection, as described by Flagpole magazine, was classic See Dan Paint - "a crowd of brightly colored and boldly outlined cartoon monsters, calaveras, luchadores and other randomly personified objects like a tooth, pickle, pair of underwear, light bulb and block of cheese," with Dan adding his own take, “It’s the lowbrow art of skateboards, tattoos, cartoons, comic books, graffiti and the like that I’d consider my biggest influence and a high art form in its own right.”

In addition to the billboard displays around town that pop up periodically through the year (courtesy of Art in the Air, a project that displays local artists on billboards in Athens), Dan's art can be found anywhere from art shows and magazine covers to rain barrels and ornaments. He even painted a bicycle. And, yes, it had many faces on it.

Dan will be at the Big City Bread Holiday Market on Thursday and Friday evening with an assortment of his ornaments, small paintings and new t-shirts. He can also be contacted through his website, www.seedanpaint.com, which features several examples of his work.