'I grew up on the South Coast in Hampshire with my three brothers and mum and dad. We were encouraged to be creative from a very early age; we invented our own board games and made up our own superheroes and drew comic books.... I was always the kid at school that could draw really well and that was all down to my mum... she always told me that you can never be bored if you can create your own fun. My imagination was my world to roam, and I embraced it’ says Dan.
Observing the figures within Dan’s work here, one could easily mistake him for being a traditional portrait artist. Though, take a longer look and you will begin to see that whilst the figures themselves remain to be marvellous pieces of realistic, mantlepiece style portraiture, the canvases upon which they are sketched are anything but conventional. For be it upon a skateboard, a piece of cardboard or even on the back of a used envelope, there seems no limit to the materials with which Dan will use to create his works. Indeed, it is fair to say that the imaginative spark which was ignited by his mother’s creative enthusiasm during his childhood is still burning just as brightly today.
‘I used to draw so much at school to the frustration of my teachers because it wasn’t just in art class, it was in all classes’ Dan funnily exclaims. ‘A few of my teachers made me a deal that if I paid attention to the class subject for half a lesson then they would allow me to draw for the second half ’. Though whilst Dan was a keen drawer, he soon began during his youth to channel his creative energies elsewhere.
‘I also turned my attention away from art for a while and instead to music. It was for me a creative experience that I could share with others like I used to with my brothers when I was young: writing music, lyrics and arranging original compositions with my band. We did really well and played up and down the U.K and in many festivals but as we all got a bit older and some of us settled down to have families, I ultimately fell back in love with drawing and painting’.
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