Dunlop Maxply Fort Drawing

My drawings are highly rendered personal items that come from my childhood growing up on the St. Clair River in Algonac, Michigan. I call my work “Happy Art” because the inspiration to create each piece is simple to appreciate, easy to understand, and the work makes me -- and others, happy. Before I started drawing again, I spent 40 years of my life working in advertising, an industry I still love. Twenty of those years were spent as an international, award-winning Executive Creative Director working for some of the largest ad agencies in the country on some of the most creative accounts in the world. Much of that career was spent in vibrant, competitive, creative advertising markets like Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and Phoenix. Then, in 2010, we moved to Fresno… where for the first time in my professional career I experienced, what it’s like to have my creative soul sucked dry. That was just my experience, and as they say, “your mileage may vary.” It was awful — but here’s the amazing part; my wife, Lynn, knew how unhappy I was and, without any job offer or freelance prospects to provide income, she told me to quit. I think her exact words were, “Get the f**k out of there now! Please.” I did. That’s where this journey truly begins. Lynn encouraged me to start drawing again — something I hadn’t done in many years. My natural instinct was to pour what I was feeling emotionally into my art. My first attempts at painting captured the emotional struggle I was feeling of being trapped in darkness, yet needing to let my creativity out. But, these pieces were dark and somewhat foreboding. The issue for me was that this direction (while true) was not cathartic and was not making me happy. I’d always found drawing with a pencil to be meditative, so one day, I sat down at my desk and started drawing my Stan Smith tennis shoes. They were so beat-up, just like me. The leather was incredibly soft with some scars and scuffs, like me. And yet they still had a lot of life left in them, once again, like me. When Lynn saw what I was doing she wanted it framed and hung by our front door so that everyone coming to our home could see what her husband had drawn. That felt so great. It was like being a kid again and having a drawing put on the refrigerator for everyone to see. Then it hit me, I was feeling really happy. What to draw next? I started thinking about the things that made me happy as a child. As I drew, I put progressive drawings up on Facebook.