Each Exists As Many.
I visited Danny quite often in the first several months after meeting him. He seemed to be sizing me up at first. He'd ask me questions about my beliefs, my activities, how I viewed the world and my place in it. With my continued appreciation and obvious delight, Danny opened up more and more, sharing his motives, frustrations and the incomprehensible scope of his effort. He revealed the multitudes.
Danny slowly granted me access to an amazing collection, an entire body of work that was all related, all unique. I felt like an archeologist discovering an untouched tomb, an explorer finding a treasure trove. I was aghast, astounded, a bit overwhelmed. It didn't seem possible that someone could create so much artwork with a consistent style for so many years and be so completely unrecognized for it. Most people would do whatever brings them some kind of gain, but as I've now learned Danny had a different objective when it came to art.
"I sometimes think I'm creating one work of art that appears in thousands of frames." Danny once explained. Indeed, if you look at his work as a sequence, as an ongoing effort, you see how a multitude of individual elements have come to create a large but cohesive body. Each piece is related to every other by common artistic elements as well as a common maker. The individual strokes are sometimes captured by themselves, sometimes in concert with others much like them, sometimes harmonizing with other types of individual strokes within a composition, and sometimes in a massive synergistic symphony. A single work that has become thousands.
Danny's work is very organic and natural, as opposed to planned and manufactured. While most things in our world are built of other things that serve a specific purpose, Danny's work is made of many other works that seem to have only one purpose - purity. This goes back to respecting each stroke. It's a respect he couldn't give if he felt the source of that stroke was coming from the desires of mind instead of from creativity itself.
Organisms behave this way. Bodies are made of cells made of organelles. There is terrific redundancy, and yet all belong. Each is complete and alone, but also all come together to create a single identifiable living being. And this happens again and again, being after being, to create species and families and orders and kingdom.
One could categorize Danny's work this way too – into individuals, families, societies and other such taxonomies. Which for some reason makes him laugh. "You're seeing things again." Regardless of my suggestions and pronouncements, he just claims to be a simple man. Take for example the paintings on this page. They are done with just two pigments, no more. "See how simple I am?" he'd say. I'd say simultaneously simple and complex – or complexity born of simplicity. And again, this is the principal of the organic, the organized, the integrally bound.
And herein lies a visible demonstration of the crux of Danny's labors — a world of images that appear to belong together, flowed into place by pure creativity, each beautiful as a standalone, awesome as a family, and done one stroke at a time with a couple of tubes of paint. Excellent.
Bodies>